Are Restaurant Rankings Good Or Bad Or Good Or What?
On the new article in The New Yorker questioning the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List
Last week, I, flush in my imaginary Director of Product of the Entire World role, suggested to my girlfriend that Yelp should do away with its ratings system because, I don’t know, isn’t it about time something more elaborate, explicating and advanced curated our disposable income decisions? To which she mocked me and mocked me some more. And perhaps rightfully so. Yelp’s raison d’être is the five-star ratings system and without it or without something similar to it to ensure ease of use for those in need of curation and to cultivate and continue cultivating the discourse on an individual establishment, Yelp would probably cease to exist, very quickly probably. Why ruin a (relatively) good thing?
The same question seems conjured in Lauren Collins’ very recent article in The New Yorker titled “Who’s To Judge? How the World’s 50 Best Restaurants are chosen” which the details the difficulty and potential industry-affecting deleteriousness in determining the best fifty restaurants in the world for any given year — an honor that can change the life of a chef and soar the trajectory of her or his restaurant.
Tonally, the piece occupies a kind of fashionable cynicism about the practice of ranking things and listing things, and to be honest, it’s hard to disagree. Ranking things is only fun when you avoid actually thinking about the epistemology of ranking things. If it’s a list of your 33 Favorite Quotes from Clueless, it’s easy to avoid any deep thinking about the endeavor. If it’s a list that has the potential to disturb people’s livelihoods — for better or for worse or for both — and has the potential to distort the public’s perception of what is good quality and what is bad quality pertaining to a certain industry, then perhaps a little more rigor needs to be applied in its process and a little more philosophy needs to be explored and embraced in its thinking. Consider what Collins writes:
On one level, the suspicion surrounding the 50 Best is conceptual. People simply find its premise to be flawed. Helen Rosner, of the website Eater, told me, “Even if you set out to do this with absolutely impeccable integrity, it is astonishingly unrealistic, given the scale of humanity and our life span and our gastronomic limitations, for anyone to make any kind of informed objective linear ranking in a certain time frame of the best restaurants in the world.” This is, in some ways, a problem of nomenclature. The list might more accurately be called The World’s Hottest 50 Restaurants, or 50 Restaurants We Enjoyed During the Past Eighteen Months. The presence of a superlative strikes literalists as either dishonest or deluded — a beauty pageant masquerading as a spelling bee. Even if you could assess all the restaurants in the world, other critics ask, how could you presume to compare a bistro, a tapas bar, an izakaya, a crêperie?
In a lot of ways historical and cultural movements both big and small follow a general vacillation between two extreme opposites (e.g. a strong police force becoming too powerful and corrupt and consequently becoming diminished by an uprising of those whom it polices only to become so weak it becomes ineffective and thus returns to a path of being eventually too powerful, and so on and so forth). The hope and the idea, by the way, is that between each vacillation the society in question learns something and aims to improve itself in that facet and in doing so, progresses to a more ideal balanced state as opposed to simply swinging dumbly and longly from one extreme to the other and learning little in the process.
With restaurant rankings, a relatively recent concept, you could say we’re in the process of swinging from something more democratic (e.g. lists and ratings contributed by a panel or crowd of people) — the state we’ve been in for the last 15 or so years in which people have had the vested interest in creating some semblance of organization from the vast and cacophonously composed world of dining — to something once again more authoritarian (e.g. curators, reviews and experience-based storytelling) as people interested in this kind of shit grow further disenchanted with the false reality these restaurant rankings tend to promulgate and desire something more detailed and verifiable and narrative-based and thus, experienced.
However, it should be noted, earlier this year, I wrote a very, very, very long and seemingly credible review of Noma Japan based on nothing but other people’s reviews, photos and extrapolations based on my own culinary experiences, so long story short, it’s not as if longform storytelling can’t be gamed either.
Not to mention, it’d be hard-headed and wrong to forget rankings, ratings and lists to the ether. Lists can be legit. A happy medium to the industry’s economic desire for list-based promotion and everyone’s desire for something more verifiably true and earned could look like something like Jonathan Gold’s annual 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles list, which is, yes, a list but is also a list compiled by a Los Angeles lifer and one of the world’s most respected food writers and someone who almost verifiably knows more about food in Los Angeles than anybody else, not to mention someone who is as transparent about his approach as he is about his enthusiasm for food in Los Angeles.
And crowdsourcing, no matter if it’s as small as The Diners Club of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants or as vast as the Yelp universe, doesn’t have to be necessarily bad for restaurants. I feel like it’s only a matter of time — if it hasn’t begun already — before Yelp implements large-scale machine learning practices into its recommendations experience, hopefully placing less value on the number of stars given and more value on the substance of the reviews and the reviewer (which they already kind of do) to create something more meaningful and less corruptible — the way, say, a friend or co-worker or acquaintance would talk you, the undeniable holy grail for curation engines.
I guess what I’m also saying is that lists and Yelp ratings and rankings and all this shit can be both bad and also very productive for a discourse and the discourse. The World’s 50 Best Restaurants seems like a poorly constructed list (even if it does a seemingly decent job at compiling a list of 50 at least very good restaurants) but at least we’re out here talking about how to do this better and having an aesthetics-ass conversation.
I think to when Collins describes a dish by the chef who won the Chefs’ Choice Award at this year’s World’s 50 Best event as “a soup of Patagonian rainwater served on a bed of moss.” Once we get over our initial GTFO buzz, we should feel compelled to ask what makes a soup of rainwater better than say an on-point late night taco or what makes that taco better than a soup of rainwater or does this even matter and if not, then why? And then we realize we’re only thinking about this because of some stupid, some almost improbably industry-accepted, very flawed list and whether we’re simply happy to know about the existence of rainwater soup or happy to be debating the merits of its perceived quality or happy that dismissing it further sharpens our gustatory sensibility, it was in fact because this list inspired such dismay-like and desperation-like outrage. Feeding the troll should always be the last resort in creating dialogues but sometimes, like what they say about vengeance, only outrage will do.
