Zagat's
Back when I lived in Chicago, I somehow wound up on the mailing list for the Zagat's guide. I think I filled out some survey to get a free restaurant guide.
When the time came to assemble the guide for the following year, I received notification in my email that I had been selected to be one of their restaurant raters. If you've never read a Zagat guide, they basically just pull one word "quotes" from hundreds of reviews, and use those quotes to assemble their own setences. For example, an entry might read:
McDONALDS
This "hip" "eatery" provides "average" hamburgers and "delicious," "salty" fries to "ravenous" and "poor" customers.
It always seemed absurd to me that people would spend time reviewing these restaurants, only to have the word "hip" pulled out of their 100 word review and shared with the masses. As I filled my survey out, I decided to write some of the craziest shit that came to mind, so if and when the Zagat's people pulled one of my quotes, I would know it was mine and not 1,000 other people who also used the word "delicious."
Months later, when the book came out, I scoured its pages for the restaurants I'd reviewed. While I found a word or two that may have come from my reviews but still seemed too mundane to claim as my own work, there was a review for a 24 hour Mexican joint a few blocks from our apartment that included an entire sentence I was positive only I had written. It was the only thing I had written for this place, and it was:
"Just get the food and put it in your mouth."
I'm sad to say I never got the chance to see if the owners of the restaurant ever put the Zagat entry up in their storefront window.
posted by Dylan Gaughan @ 10:23 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
If I recall, part of the conversation that went into that review was premised on the thought that:
1) this is a 24-hour Mexican restaurant located in the over-saturated bar district of our former neighborhood and so, if you're at El Presidente, then you're probably there to specifically feed your abject drunkeness. Thus, there's no time to get specific with your palette, i.e, "Just get the food and put it in your mouth" and
2) the only real way to guarantee that you'd get published in the guide itself is to cut through all the bullshit, padded adjectives and distill your review down to something undeniably true about the restaurant itself, i.e., it's the real deal for Chicago Mexican food so "just get the food and put it in your mouth."
The strategy worked like a charm and my faith in the peer-reviewed process was restored. I only wish there was a Zagat's Omaha so that the experiment could continue. (You'll have to make a point to sample some NY cuisine when you're out here and we'll have another go of it.)
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