11 Reasons Your Yelp Reviews Suck, and 11 Things You Can Do About It

I recently appeared on Minnesota Public Radio’s “Daily Current” program in a segment entitled, “Everyone's a critic: Yelp reviews hold great power”, which examines the growing impact of amateur restaurant reviews posted to sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp and Chowhound.* In preparation for this interview, I gathered some thoughts about the flaws in many amateur reviews, the concerns I have with anonymous reviews, and some tips for amateurs on writing fair and useful restaurant reviews.

COMMON PROBLEMS WITH AMATEUR REVIEWS

I’m very wary of taking restaurant advice from anonymous reviewers online for the same reasons I wouldn’t trust a stranger who gave me unsolicited advice on the street. I don’t know anything about you; who knows what kind of awful food you like? But beyond this issue, which I’ll dig into more below, I often see a host of common problems in the reviews on sites like Yelp. Specifically, the reviewer:

• Bases his opinion on too small a sample or an unrepresentative one: a single visit, or brunch, a Restaurant Week meal, or on what the industry calls the Shitshow Days – New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving Eve -- where specialty menus and/or mobs of customers don’t reflect the typical dining experience. There are good reasons why pros always put in three or four visits before formulating an opinion. You should, too, though just two visits would still be better than one.

• Is obviously making unfair judgments or poor decisions based on ignorance of the restaurant’s cuisine, level of formality, intentions, or audience. For example, he’s angry that he couldn’t order Cantonese dishes at a Sichuan restaurant, doesn’t understand why the dive bar serves poorly-made Martinis, or can’t believe the Michelin three-star place has no children's menu and won’t seat him while he’s wearing a bathing suit and flip-flops.

• Clearly has no understanding of how restaurants work. She can’t tell the difference between a service error and a kitchen error, gets angry when she hasn’t made a reservation at a peak time and has to wait for a table, or gets upset that the restaurant won’t seat her incomplete party. (Even pros can be guilty of this last one, hard as that may be to believe.)

• Has no sense of how to optimize the dining experience by speaking up to fix a problem. To do this, it helps to understand which errors can be fixed right away (e.g., the wrong order arriving, an underdone steak) and those that can’t (e.g., the dining room is too loud, there are no halal options). If you don’t bring a fixable problem to your server’s attention, they can’t fix it.

• Makes unmerited claims to authority. “I have an Italian surname; I know Italian food.” “I did Spring Break in Cancun; I know Mexican food.” “I’m a foodie; I am very particular about food.” Sorry, but none of that has any bearing on your ability to write an informed restaurant review. Dave Andelman claims to have eaten every single meal of his adult life in restaurants: have you noticed the awful crap his Phantom Gourmet TV show heartily endorses? Maybe you just stepped off the boat from China, but favored American-style fast food there, and thus are a lousy judge of actual Chinese cuisine.

• Betrays a lack of human empathy, often expressed by a condescending tone toward the staff. The reviewer doesn’t appear to have ever considered what it would be like to have strangers rating him on his annual job performance based on a single 90-minute meeting.

• Reveals an undue sense of entitlement: she appears to expect special treatment at the expense of other customers, that the restaurant should bend the rules for her because it’s her birthday, or that no demand is unreasonable because “ the customer is always right” – in general, an attitude that a restaurant is obligated to cater to her every whim.

• Has unreasonable expectations on whether the restaurant can accommodate special dietary preferences, allergies, restrictions, taboos, etc., and wrongfully assumed without calling ahead that it can and should be able to deal with every customer's gluten intolerance, veganism, aversion to onions, etc.

• Shows a lack of deep contextual knowledge of the kind that informs really useful food writing. The reviewer has no experience working in restaurants, a shallow grasp of the local restaurant scene, limited perspective on its history, a poor compass on emerging local and national culinary trends and talent, little direct experience of international cuisines from travel abroad, meager knowledge of beer, wine, spirits, and cocktails, and scant home cooking skills.

• Includes a raft of details unrelated to food, service and atmosphere under the mistaken belief that these will be of interest to strangers. I’m glad you were out with your dear Great-Aunt Margie and were wearing your favorite party dress and saw Jacoby Ellsbury at the next table and had a bunch of cocktails and were really lit by the time dinner arrived, but let’s skip all that. Only your closest friends care, and even they are probably bored with that story.

• Has an obvious agenda behind an overtly positive or negative review. The reviewer is either a shill (an investor, owner, employee, public relations agent, friend or relative of the restaurant) or an axe-grinder (an investor, owner, or employee of a competitor, an unethical PR person angry the restaurant ditched him for another firm, a disgruntled ex-employee, the owner’s jilted ex-paramour.) Ever wonder why that one reviewer only talks about Seaport restaurants, and defends even the most mediocre ones to the death? Maybe she works in marketing for a developer in the neighborhood, or is trying to boost the value of her Waterfront condo. The problem of phony online reviews is growing, and the fakers are getting better at masking their biases.

THE OPACITY OF ANONYMOUS REVIEWS

As I said, I distrust any review from a person about whom I know nothing. At a minimum, I need to feel some confidence that the reviewer and I share the same sensibilities, that we like and dislike the same kinds of places. This makes reviews on sites where reviewers remain anonymous, like Zagat (now part of Google) and OpenTable, quite useless to me. With professional reviewers and bloggers, you can glean their point of view, expertise and trustworthiness by reading their published body of work -- for starters, by looking at places you’ve both been to and seeing if you mostly agree or disagree with their opinions on them.

With a little effort, you can make similar assessments of amateurs if they review under a consistent identity, as is done on Chowhound, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. By reading a dozen or so of an individual's bylined opinions about places you know, you can begin to gauge their knowledge, contextual depth and tastes. Finding someone you trust in this manner is far more likely to yield solid recommendations than taking advice from an online stranger, which is the equivalent of meeting some random nobody whose favorite restaurant might be Old Country Buffet, or that pizza place you stopped going to after you ate there sober once.

Aggregate star ratings are utterly suspect for the same reason: you know nothing about the people behind the underlying individual ratings. There are too many opinions from strangers rolled up in there, and many of them might be the sort who thinks waiting an hour for a table at The Cheesecake Factory is totally worth it.

It’s always useful to find reviewers with special expertise in or passion for certain cuisines, like the slow-smoke barbecue nerd, the oenophile with a Master of Wine qualification, or the woman who was raised on her immigrant mother’s Taiwanese cooking. Food bloggers often fall into these categories, but I count many amateurs, especially on Boston's Chowhound board, as valuable resources on this score, too.

Anonymity and aggregate star ratings thwart your ability to grasp the point of view behind opinions. Still, skimming a couple of dozen Yelp reviews can help, as long as you understand that at best these provide an approximation of the statistical mean. If you are satisfied with mass market oriented restaurants and national casual dining chains, that perspective might be adequate. If you’re one of those food geeks who considers a merely okay meal to be an avoidable tragedy, you’ve got to dig deeper than the so-called wisdom of crowds, and seek out individual voices that share your ardor for extraordinary food. That takes some work.

TIPS ON WRITING QUALITY AMATEUR REVIEWS

As an old-media restaurant critic for the last eight years, I've long understood that the value placed on professional opinions is dwindling. Three or four years ago, Boston diners could read two dozen professional restaurant reviews in local print publications every month. Now, there’s maybe half that, and I expect that number will keep shrinking. (My own longtime employer, The Boston Phoenix, the city's leading alt-weekly for nearly fifty years, ceased publication in March, 2013.) Professional critics are dinosaurs in a tar pit; the voice and weight of amateur reviewers is ascendant.

Given that you have the chance to exercise that voice loudly and often, here are a few pro tips on how to make your amateur reviews more fair, useful, and compelling:

• Don’t review a place you’ve only been to once. I’ve published over 300 professional reviews: many places I reviewed favorably didn’t make a great first impression, and some of the harsher reviews were of places that wowed me initially. In light of how important consistency is to a restaurant’s success, accumulating a larger sample size is the only way to ensure you’re being fair and accurate.

• Get your facts straight. I once called out a Yelper for slagging a ramen place (Cambridge, MA’s Yume Wo Katare) because he clearly didn’t understand the very specific style (jiro ramen) they were serving there, and defended his opinion with one erroneous assumption after another. He had some restaurant industry connections, had traveled in Asia, had visited a passel of famous, fancy ramen joints. None of this changed the fact that his comments were as ignorant as complaining that a traditional Northern Italian restaurant didn’t serve spaghetti with red sauce and meatballs. Don’t be that idiot.

• If your restaurant experience was unsatisfactory and your server didn’t fix the fixable problems you brought to their attention, take up your unresolved issues with the manager after your meal, either directly or with a follow-up phone call or email. Give the restaurant an opportunity to make things right before you flay it online.

• Skip the outline of your credentials. The fact that you are 100% Irish (meaning your great-great-great-grandparents emigrated 160 years ago in the Famine) doesn’t mean you can tell cottage pie from shepherd’s pie. Even if you did speak fluent Gaelic, you still might be a food ignoramus with lousy taste. Let your knowledge, passion, and discernment speak for itself. You may in fact be an expert on Irish cuisine, but it's not because of your genes.

• Consider that your negative review has the power to affect people’s livelihoods, especially when the place is new. One bad review of ten that have been posted hurts far worse than one out of a hundred reviews. Professionals know to give a new place a few weeks to complete a shakedown cruise; consider giving that same benefit of the doubt to fledgling enterprises.

• Recognize that the Internet gives an illusion of anonymity that is fleeting at best. Don’t exhibit “e-balls”, the bravado that arises from the imagined distance between your browser and the object of your criticism. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t say in person to the host, bartender, server, chef or owner. Assume that your pen name or alternate online identity will eventually be revealed, because it will. (Do you really think that Google, Verizon, and the NSA don’t already know who you are, Foodie1992?)

• Consider whether the restaurant’s failures are systemic or a reflection of an off night. Everyone has bad days and personal distractions to deal with. Most staffers are busting their asses to ensure you have a great meal. Last night’s fumbling server or overtired line cook may bounce back and be awesome the rest of the year, but your one-star pan based on a single anecdotal experience will persist online forever.

• Learn to cook and to serve. If you really want to deepen your appreciation of what the pros are able to do at speed and scale every night, pile up some hours in your own kitchen doing some scratch cooking: learn how to shop for fresh, seasonal produce; clean, filet and cook a fish; truss and roast a chicken; make a basic stock and vinaigrette; bake a loaf of bread; grill and roast and braise different cuts of beef; steam a lobster; cook vegetables and grains perfectly. Then try pulling off an eight-person dinner party sometime. It ain’t as easy as it looks, is it, Monsieur Ego?

• Travel, and don’t eat like a damned tourist when you do. Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations!”  is one of the few food-TV shows I have any use for because he eats abroad the way I always have done: by checking out the markets, eating the street food, avoiding anything considered the “Best Local X” in mass-market guidebooks, and finding a way to get invited to a local’s house for a home-cooked meal. You will find it mind-boggling (and usefully humbling) to discover how very much you have to learn about your favorite cuisines.

• Back at home, seek out restaurants run by immigrant chef/owners whose primary audience is his or her fellow ex-pats. These places don’t dumb down the cuisine for American palates; it’s the next best thing to traveling to their homeland. If everyone in the joint but you is not speaking English, that’s a promising sign.

• Make sure you don’t have a reason to recuse yourself. Don’t be a shill or a negative shill by reviewing a place in whose success or failure you have a hidden interest.

In short, before you lob an online dart that could hurt a small business, recognize how little you may actually know, do some homework, and act like a decent human being. The Internet has given you great power; try not to be a prick about it.

* Other guests included Jack Yu of reputology.com, which helps businesses manage their reputations by monitoring amateur reviews, and Rick Nelson, a professional restaurant critic for the Minneapolis-St. Paul daily Star-Tribune. You can listen to the MPR segment here. I don’t show up until minute 26; the whole thing is worth listening to.

Food Writing 101: On Vocabulary -- A Love Letter/Bitch Session, by Denveater & MC Slim JB (Part 1 of 2)

[Here's another in a series of joint essays by me and my friend and fellow food writer Ruth Tobias of Denver food blog Denveater, where this piece also runs. Ruth conceived of this piece, so she's the "I" here; my contributions are noted explicitly.]

Every so often, some Chowhound starts a particularly juicy, funny, & unnerving thread (like this one) about foodie terminology that either tickles or rankles — usually the latter (including “foodie” itself). Without meaning to come off like a Teen Talk Barbie, I can’t help but whine a bit as I read them about the fact that "food writing is hard!" insofar as there are only so many words to describe the sensation of taste. Play it safe, & you’re bound to bore everyone out of their skulls, yourself included; jazz it up, and you’re sure to raise the howling specter of Restaurant Girl, the New York Daily News’s infamous erstwhile critic whose prose prompted my Boston-based food-critic pal MC Slim JB to host what remains one of my favorite snark-parties ever on the boards. A taste of Danyelle Freeman’s work:

"Even better, the homemade ravioli look like a store-bought sheet straight from a box. It's a deceptive maneuver with criminally delicious returns: Each doughy pocket gets plumped with a vivacious mix of four cheeses and spackled with a silky lettuce sauce."

Still, preferring the sound of laughter, however derisive, to that of steady snoring, I know I err on the side of exuberant overwriting myself. Slim agrees: “My food writing tends towards the rococo, especially when I’m trying to communicate emotions inspired by food. If you want to go beyond food reporting (‘Here’s what was served, how it looked, the ingredient list’) and give readers a flavor of the experience of pleasure in eating, it’s tough not get a little florid at times.”

Slim goes on: “The reality is that writing, not just food writing, truly is hard, even for people who ostensibly have the tools. For example, the notorious Ms. Freeman went to Harvard, wrote for the fourth-largest daily in the US, understands grammar and syntax, and has a high-SAT-score vocabulary. Nevertheless, she’s just an appalling writer, almost unreadable in her awfulness. But she’s an extreme example. The sins that offend us daily are more garden-variety: crimes against diction, thudding clichés, unnecessary neologisms. You don’t have to be Restaurant-Girl-horrendous to make us wince, eye-roll, or wish you’d done one more revision: just use hackneyed, empty phrases like ‘cooked to perfection’.”

Words, we recognize, are like anything else we humans use to communicate who we are & where we stand—gestures, clothing, hairstyles: they’re a matter of taste (in the broad sense), which means not everyone is going to like them. Hence, while we’ve been dishing for years on our own pet phrases—haters be damned!—as well as the clunkers & clichés that make us cringe, we don’t agree on everything. All part of the fun learning curve.

Here, then, is our signed manifesto/confession/defense.

Words MC Slim JB Loves

Says Slim, “I’m not offering these as Words Food Writers Should Use, just examples of Words I Love. I culled these from the sixty professional pieces I wrote this year. I sweat hard over word choice; few editorial decisions annoy me more than the substitution of an insipid, ninth-grade-reading-level word for one I painstakingly chose for its dense or allusive or narrow meaning. Saying a flavor is assaultive is not the same as calling it strong or intense.”

Describing qualities of food: toothsome (properly used to describe a certain texture, typically of pasta), luscious,velvety, zippy, lusty, miserly, parsimonious, prosaic, lyrical, zingy, bedecked, cunning, vivid, eye-goggling,acerbic, insipid, high-craft, icky-sweet

Describing a venue or its atmosphere: dumpy, seedy, ramshackle, a hog trough, boîte, hell-hole, soigné,crepuscular, dingy, gouging, a swindle, frippery, glowing, low-fuss, glossy, faux glamour, theme-parky,kitschy, hokey

Describing servers and chefs: convivial, stony, sassy, sweet-natured, cherubic, toque, seminal

Describing customers: food nerd (my coinage to replace foodie), white-bread, inky-hipster, multi-culti, philistine, nutbag, ding-dong

Intensifiers (positive): dizzying, ravishing, rough-and-ready, beguiling, righteous, serviceable, precious, gobsmacking, jaw-dropping, breathtaking

Intensifiers (negative): shameless, harrowing, appalling, sullied, dubious, benighted, fraudulent, egregious, grotesque, bastardized, grating

Slim, in reviewing this list: “Pretentious? Possibly, though I’ll defend foreign words like recherché when English doesn’t have pithy equivalents. Forcing you to consult dictionary.com? Occasionally, though I never choose a fifty-cent word when the nickel one will suffice; nobody likes a showoff. [Except me.—Denveater] Saying precisely, pungently what I mean? That’s the ultimate goal, the rationale behind every word choice.”

Words Denveater Loves

Boîte. Yeah, yeah, yeah, French throwaways are pretentious. But the English equivalent, “nightclub,” is a snooze. And where would you rather be—in the tiny, twinkling café, drinking wine & eating cheese by candlelight to the stylings of a beret-topped guitarist, that “boîte” evokes, or in the strobe-lit slaughterhouse of a “nightclub,” surrounded by screaming, stumbling, puking also-ran-tweens? Exactly.

Crispy. Slim’s right (see Part 2); crisp does the trick. But the diminutive -y suffix is just so damn cute, taking me back to Prague circa 1998, where the bathrooms were marked Toilety…

Eatery. Why this term strikes people as cutesy is beyond me—it’s really about as straightforwardly all-purpose as they come. Not every place that serves food is a café (which implies a degree of informality) or even a restaurant (Italians, at least, reserve ristorante for a high-end establishment), much less a taqueria/trattoria/tapas bar/bistro/barbecue shack/izakaya et cetera. But they’re all eateries.

Gastropub. I get the complaints, but I don’t agree with the complaints. The word was coined in the UK more than a decade ago under perfectly reasonable circumstances: to convey the fact that the word “pub” no longer needed be synonymous with “greasy grub” whose sole purpose was to absorb alcohol as quickly & unremarkably as possible. A chef-led movement toward food that was deceptively simple rather than merely honest, hearty, & every bit as delicious as the ales & ciders they accompanied was underway; that movement has turned out to be a revolution, & its stateside variant is to be applauded. Accordingly, the prefix “gastro” strikes me as sensible; those who object to it on the grounds that it reminds them of stomach ailments then must also do away with “gastronomy,” a word that dates back to 4th century Greece. The fact is, eating doesn’t begin & end with the mouth; it involves the whole digestive system. If Americans accepted that more readily—the processes and consequences of food intake—maybe we’d be in better shape.

Quaff. Okay, it’s a little goofy, but we English speakers have far too few opportunities to use the letter “q.” And the fact that its coinage dates back to 1523 speaks to its antiquated appeal: it makes me think of toddies & wassail & other such festive bygones.

Succulent. A sexy alternative to “moist” or “juicy.” Some people say you shouldn’t use $2 words when 10-cent words are available; I say those people are linguistic cheapskates. (Slim excepted.)

Unctuous. It’s true that the word has negative connotations—but only when used in its figurative sense, to mean “ingratiating.” Used in its literal sense, as a synonym for “oily” or “fatty,” it’s not unpleasant to me; in fact, unlike its synonyms, it suggests a softness or smoothness that may have to do with the fact that unction is a healing ritual. Think of it, then, as implying that butter makes you better, & slather it on!

Part 2, on Words We Hate, is here.

“That’s Not Poutine!”: Observations on Culinary Authenticity and the Exaltation of Drunk Food

Poutine is very popular in Boston right now, a fact I noted in Stuff Magazine last summer in its trendspotting Hot Issue, with my award for Hot Canadian Import: “…one of the world's great cheap drunk-foods, the mighty poutine (pronounced poo-TEEN*). Quebec City tipplers know no night is complete without hitting some seedy, fluorescent-lit casse-croûte or dumpy food truck after last call for a $5 plate of French fries drenched in gravy and tooth-squeaking cheese curds. Bostonians being more discriminating than the average Québécois**, we sometimes like our poutine fancy, as at Pops (560 Tremont Street, Boston, 617.695.1250), where it's topped with short-rib gravy and house-made sausages of rabbit, duck, and wild boar***, and at Harvest (44 Brattle Street, Cambridge, 617.868.2255), where it comes with chicken velouté and bacon. But the moment's hottest poutine purveyor is undoubtedly The Gallows (1395 Washington Street, Boston, 617.425.0200), which, in true gastropub fashion, labors hard over every humble ingredient and does it four ways: classic (in a dark-chicken or vegetarian-friendly mushroom gravy), topped with local produce, topped with foie gras, and the daily changing ‘out of control’ version (sample toppings: sweetbreads, lardons, English peas, and spring onions). That's a platter even a sober person could love.”

A recent discussion on Chowhound’s Boston board digs deeper into the current poutine phenomenon. I observe there that I enjoy poutine to a point -- the point where I think, "Are gravy fries really such a great idea?" Isn’t crispness part of the fry ideal? Shouldn’t we prefer fries that are sauced on the side instead of in the kitchen, which is necessarily going to make them a bit soggy before they hit the table? But the larger question centers on that ancient food-nerd hobbyhorse: is Restaurant X’s version of Dish Y authentic?

I noted that The Gallows' fries are good, its gravies and optional deluxe add-ons excellent. The bone of contention for most poutine lovers is The Gallows' choice of cheese, which though house-made is more like soft, fresh mozzarella than the fromage beaucronne of the canonical version beloved in Quebec: firm cheddar curds, made fresh every day, that literally squeak on your teeth. Very few restaurants in Boston use cheese curds in their poutine -- Eat at Jumbo's in Somerville and All-Star Sandwich Bar in Inman Square are reportedly two exceptions -- and no one is making their own. Also, technically, the sauce should be a velouté – stock thickened with blond roux to achieve a velvety texture -- not just any old gravy, but I think the use of squeaky curds remains the shibboleth for poutine traditionalists.

Some folks further argue that gussying up poutine with fancy ingredients and charging more than $5 immediately takes it out of the realm of drunk food and makes it something else altogether, something – cue menacing music -- inauthentic. My own feeling is that there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking humble food upscale, replacing mediocre ingredients with quality ingredients, piling on luxury elements, and so on. Canadians themselves have long been dressing up poutine with a dizzying array of add-ons. And Americans didn’t invent $23 poutine au foie gras, either: that was the brainchild of hallowed Montreal snout-to-tail institution Au Pied de Cochon.

Nowadays, every rough-and-ready dish that was first served at a food truck, carnival stand, or greasy spoon eventually gets a genteel makeover, as anyone who's debated the relative merits of Boston's many $20 hamburgers should understand. It's a process that is ripe for derision as pretentious, ridiculous, as evidenced by the jeers and incredulity that greeted the $16 hot dog at Barbara Lynch's The Butcher Shop. The same people who don't blink at paying $8 for a cask-conditioned ale scoff at the $11 pork dumplings at Myers + Chang, saying, "I could get those in Chinatown for $3." Ken Oringer still gets grief in some quarters for his $4 tacos at La Verdad.

But applying that general aesthetic, in this case to modest tavern fare, is in fact what gastropubs like The Gallows, Russell House Tavern, and Garden at The Cellar are all about. I believe the quality of such dishes, wrapped as they are with good drinks, convivial service and cool atmosphere, more than justifies their prices, despite their inglorious origins. Foie gras poutine sounds crazy, except for the fact that the path from the street cart to the white tablecloth is a well-trodden one.

I also believe that despite its relative youth – most sources agree that poutine first emerged sometime in the 1950s – there is a genuine canon or tradition associated with poutine, a classic recipe, any variance from which will offend purists. (I’ve gotten an earful on the depravity of American poutines from a Québécois in-law of mine.) So I think it's perfectly germane to note a widely-held set of expectations about a dish from the regional or ethnic group that originated or popularized it. I have no problem with chefs breaking from a canon -- our food world would be pretty sad if this never happened -- but I think it's important to understand the tradition as a reference point. Maybe nobody cares that spaghetti and meatballs isn't often served in Italy, but it doesn't help your credibility in a discussion to pretend this isn't so, or to market your version as "just like they do in the Old Country".

Some observers object to discussing poutine seriously in the first place: “It’s just drunk food, after all”, and it is true that a lot of poutine in Quebec gets consumed at about 3am after a night in the bars. Or they dismiss it as “peasant food”: potatoes and gravy and primitive cheese, cheap and unsophisticated. I dislike the pejorative use of these terms: "drunk food" and "peasant food" should be non-judgmental. "Cucina povera", for instance, has positive connotations of applying thrift and creativity to a limited larder in straitened circumstances. Drunk food doesn't say to me, "food for the undiscriminating", but does imply inexpensive, salty/fatty/starchy, and available late. There's good drunk food and bad --think of the varying quality of all-night diners -- and yes, some purveyors are getting away with something because their patrons don't care so much. But I don't consider it necessarily a slur on the food itself. The pad kee mao (“drunken noodles”) at Allston’s S&I Thai is a plate of wonderment, even if one etymology of its name suggests drunk food.

So as Bostonians continue to climb aboard the poutine bandwagon, I will note that: a) there is indeed a canonical version of this dish, and very few restaurants around here serve it; b) there should be as much room for carefully-considered and passionate appreciation of so-called drunk foods and other lowborn fare as for haute cuisine****; and c) chefs in Boston shouldn’t be dismissed for wanting to dress poutine in fancy clothes and take it uptown. In other words, in food, as in life, it helps your appreciation of things to have clear-eyed knowledge of exactly where you came from, but that shouldn’t stop you from moving forward, setting a high standard of quality even for your more humble pursuits, and maybe spinning off in some crazy directions once in a while.

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* I have since learned that this Anglicized pronunciation is wrongedty-wrong-wrong. The proper Quebec French pronunciation is more like "poo-tin", with both syllables about equally stressed.

** This is pure pandering to my readers.

*** The excellent riff on poutine served at Pops is currently listed on its menu as "grilled sausage trio".

**** I have a floor for this, e.g., I don't think mega-chain dreck like McDonald's McRib or the KFC Double Down merits serious consideration, what my friend Robert Nadeau calls "the connoisseurship of teenagers." No offense, kids, but I remember what I ate in those days.

Good Signs, Bad Signs (You Know We’ve Had Our Share): A Deconstructionist’s Guide to Gauging Restaurant Quality

The following is a collaboration between my good friend Ruth Tobias of the inestimable Denver-based food/drink blog Denveater (tagged herein as Denv.), myself (tagged as MCSJB), Boston blogger Hidden Boston (tagged as HB), and Denver blogger Denver on a Spit (tagged as DOAS).

The idea for the post, the selection of the contributors, and the editing of all our input into a coherent whole was all Ruth's: many thanks to her for her originality, hard work, and supreme cat-herding effort. She is the first-person "I" in this piece. If you see a restaurant name you don't recognize, it's likely in the Denver area.

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I knew the Director and I were in for a long night at the not-surprisingly-now-defunct Mark and Isabella the second we stepped inside and I saw the slogan on the back of a server’s T-shirt: “Got lasagna?” Faux-snark swiped from an ad campaign that had long since been borrowed to the point of grinding cliché did not bode well for the freshness of the dining experience—and sure enough, from the half-hearted service to the even-less-hearted cooking, the meal was a real drag. It occurred to me then that outside of roadhouses and shacks—clam, BBQ, burger, and otherwise—cheeky T-shirts might be an indication that the powers that be were putting the style cart before the substance horse.

When my theory was confirmed at the meh Via della Pace in Manhattan's East Village a couple months back, it got me to thinking about other indirect but generally reliable signs that a place is going to rock or suck. Cheesy Asian pop in an Asian restaurant, for instance: good. Cheesy American pop in an American restaurant: bad. Frank Sinatra in an Italian restaurant: really bad. Sleek logos: good. Gaudy logos: bad. No logos at all: probably bad (assuming it’s a pretentious appeal to insiderly exclusivity—although read on for an important exception). And so on.

It also got me to asking other food bloggers for their thoughts on the subject; here, the authors of Denver on a Spit, MC Slim JB, and Hidden Boston graciously offer up some worthy words to the wise (hey, that’s you!). Which doesn’t mean you should take them entirely without a grain of salt; as MC Slim JB points out, “It's an old Chowhound adage that deliciousness turns up where you least expect it. I am still routinely surprised to find great food in places I figured would be awful, and bad food where I expected joy. And I keep ‘discovering’ great little joints that have been around for years; I just never noticed them or happened by their neighborhoods. So don't take these rules of thumb as durable: there are always exceptions, and pleasant surprises hiding behind ominous first impressions are among the great pleasures of dining out.”

With that said:

+ (PLUS) SIGNS

English—or Rather the Lack Thereof

This may seem fairly obvious, but a good sign when looking for good food is a lack of English. This can start with the customers. If the customers are all talking in a language other than English, then chances are you have found a place that is at least authentic. This can backfire, of course, because if you go the McDonald's on Alameda near Federal; a lot of people may be talking in Vietnamese or Spanish, but you're still in a Wack Arnold's. If the waitstaff doesn't or barely speaks English, then that could be a good sign, too—but that could also happen at McDonald's. So probably the best indication is that the menu is in another language—especially if all or parts of it are not translated. [Conversely, see Dining for Dummies below—Denv.] Also, you probably want to figure out how to order off that part of the menu. Like at Denver’s New Saigon. Ever notice that untranslated page in Vietnamese? The servers often strongly discourage non-natives from ordering from there. Ignore them.— DOAS

A staff that cheerfully labors to overcome language barriers (example: East Boston's Restaurante Montecristo). Actually, that's a red herring: restaurants with little English in the front of the house that don't try to work with my kindergartner's Spanish can be good, too [see: El Taco de Mexico—Denv], but I'm impressed when they bother.—MCSJB

Wheels, Tents and Tunes

Signage—or Rather the Lack Thereof [an exception to my "no logos" rule—Denv.]

Speaking of signs good and bad, a complete lack of signage is often a good sign. Las Tortugas on Alameda just recently added a sign after years without. This is one of the most authentic torta experiences you will have outside of Mexico. A restaurant not only surviving but flourishing without any kind of advertising can only mean good things. Places like these grow by word of mouth. They have no websites, emails or, at times, even traceable phone numbers. If you are lucky enough to find one, then it is likely that you have stumbled upon something special. Likewise, signs you can't understand are often good.—DOAS

Attitude—or the Lack Thereof
Many restaurants feel the need to cater to every whiny need of its customers at any cost. Others, in the tradition of the Soup Nazi, post a list of rules that owners expect their customers to follow. These places know their food is good. If you are worried about pissing off the restaurant owners or cook, it must be good. When dining at Tom’s Diner in Denver, read the rules and don’t be a pain in the ass. The result? Some of the best Southern fare you can hope for in Denver.—DOAS

A warm, sincere-sounding greeting from the hostess stand immediately upon entering. A flustered, supercilious, or inattentive maître d' is a red flag.—MCSJB
[See: Wild Bangkok—Denv.]

A chef-owned place that closes when the chef goes on holiday (example: Trattoria Toscana near Fenway). The level of professional pride reflected in the implied motto, “If I'm not here cooking, it's not my food,” is generally encouraging.—MCSJB

Tableware—or the Lack Thereof
Environmental awareness has not yet expanded to encompass all restaurants equally. So if you are comfortable enlarging your carbon footprint from time to time in exchange for some good food, then an unfortunate good sign is often paper plates, plastic forks and Styrofoam cups (big ones).

Meanwhile, napkins are fluff. In my own home, napkins are for when guests like parents come over. Paper towels are absorbent and good for dabbing the corners of your mouth, wiping up big saucy spills from the table and sopping up the grease you can't lick off your fingers. A roll of paper towels on each table is a solid sign of good food. The opposite of the paper towel is ultra-thin, almost transparent tissue-paper napkins. I have not seen a lot of these in the States, but in many countries this is the standard. If you grab for a napkin, then need to grab four more to sop up a pea-sized spill, you have chosen well.

[See: Tin Star Cafe Donut Haus—DOAS]

Roots, Part 1: Where Everybody Looks the Same [to the tune of the "Cheers" theme]

Not in the way that all white people look the same, but as in a staff that shares the same genetic makeup. Is sis hosting while bro serves and mom barks orders from the kitchen? Stay. It's going to be good.—DOAS

Son out front, mom in the back. I've run into this setup in many tiny, traditional restaurants, and the results are often wonderful.—MCSJB
[See: Lao Wang Noodle House—Denv.]

Roots, Part 2
A cliché that happens to be true: a crowd of ex-pats in a restaurant serving their homeland's cuisine, e.g., many Thai immigrants dining in a Thai restaurant. Somewhere there must be throngs of Cantonese speakers with lousy taste—the Chinese equivalent of Chili's fans—so their presence at a Hong Kong–style live-tank seafood restaurant shouldn't impress me. But I haven't run into them yet.—MCSJB
[See: Star Kitchen—Denv.]

Places with wheels always get my attention. There is something about an operation that has the potential to be portable that tickles my tastebuds. In Denver, many of my favorite meals come from food carts or out of taco trucks, running the range from Gastro Cart’s gourmet goodies to my favorite hidden loncheras (luncheonettes) in Aurora. Everything tastes better when it comes from a vehicle parked on a street corner or empty lot. As the food truck and cart boom grows in Denver this spring and summer, this might change, but for now, it's a great place to start.

Or: There is a big white canopy tent in a parking lot next to a restaurant. Under that tent is a hunk of red stacked pork loins roasting on a spit with open flame. There are juices dripping off the meat. You probably want to go there.

Also: nothing says Mexican street life (and that in many other parts of the world) like bootleg CDs and DVDs being sold on the street. If there is someone with a rack of CDs leaning against his or her car in the parking lot of a restaurant, that really can only mean good things for the food inside. If there is a guy hawking cheap plastic toys as well? Jackpot. For a special bonus, does the owner let people come in off the street and peddle stuff inside of the restaurant itself? This takes the parking lot theory to a new level, and is not limited to CDs. Tamales, cheese, and tortillas are all fair game. Denver's Taco Mex has it all.—DOAS

Cleanliness, Godliness
A spotless open kitchen where every cook has a tidy mise-en-place. Not every fine dining restaurant that exhibits this orderliness will be good, but an open kitchen without it inevitably disappoints. Also: spanking-clean bathrooms. A restaurant that minds this particular corner of the store reveals something honorable about its character.—MCSJB

– (MINUS) SIGNS

Staff: Aptitude and Attitude
"Hi, my name is ____ and I'll be your server tonight." Not the server's fault, I know: this is part of the restaurant's robotic training regimen. But it still sets my teeth on edge every time. A rote phrase of greeting is an unpromising way to start the meal.—MCSJB

Bouncers. Your place may serve food, but it's primarily a nightclub, and nightclub owners virtually never run worthwhile restaurants.—MCSJB

The host who points to your table rather than taking you to it. When hosts do this, it implies that a) they hate their job; b) they don't really care about the customers; c) they are incredibly lazy. In all three cases, it sends up warning signals to the diners.—HBPimped-out servers. Restaurants that drape female servers in tight, revealing uniforms are usually trying to distract you from some unflattering facts about their food. Staring at you, Hooters. —MCSJB
[See, er: Hooters—Denv.]

A server who sits at your table when s/he takes your order. Why do they need to sit at the table? Are they tired? Are they looking for new friends? Either way, it is irritating and vaguely disturbing, especially if the table is tight to begin with.—HB
[See: The Wine Loft—Denv.]

Schtick
The involvement of a professional athlete: their name on the marquee or their ownership stake touted in the restaurant's marketing. I can't think of a single restaurant of this type I've visited that wasn't overpriced, mediocre, or both.—MCSJB
[Elway’s is an exception, but one that proves the rule.—Denv.]

“Tony Gabbagool” shtick. Certain Italian places (example: Strega in Boston’s North End) hype their affinity for heavily-stereotyped American Mafia culture, some going so far as to hire former Sopranos bit actors to promote their restaurants. It's stale, stupid, and borderline-offensive, not a harbinger of quality.—MCSJB

A floor show. Benihana-style teppanyaki, strolling violinists, Fire + Ice falderol (you select ingredients and sauces to be stir-fried in front of you on a giant griddle), and other gimmicks often hide lackluster ingredients behind the zazzle.—MCSJB

Kitschy mismatched bric-à-brac: stuffed game-animal heads, old road signs, etc. Another casual dining trope that says, "Boil-in-bag food served here."—MCSJB

Dining for Dummies

An English-language menu that only captures a subset of the entire Chinese menu, usually featuring only Americanized dishes. This doesn't mean that Chinese restaurants with limited-for-dumb-Americans menus don't have good food, but I may never know if all they offer me is junk like crab Rangoon and General Gau's chicken. (Pointing at other customers' orders can help, but only until your next visit when you want to get that dish again.)—MCSJB

Tent cards, those little pre-printed cardboard pyramids on the table promoting a drink special (Hypnotiq Cozmos!), appetizer (Shrimp Poppers!), entree (Fettuccine Alfredo in a Bread Bowl!), or dessert (Mom's Homemade Chocolate Lava Cake!). They're a staple of national casual dining chain hellholes, and thus inspire foreboding.—MCSJB

Similarly: An insert for specials looks older than the regular menus.—HB

A menu with photos of the food (this mainly applies to traditional American places, as pictures of food at ethnic restaurants aren't always a bad thing). Usually the pictures are stock photos, which means they have nothing to do with the restaurant (unless perhaps the point is to show diners what a hamburger looks like). All they do is take up space on the menu, which may be the questionable goal of the restaurant.—HB
[In Italy, picture menus are usually accompanied by the words "Menu Turistico!" If that's not a sign to vamoose, I don't know what is.—Denv.]

First Impression (with your teeth)
Wonder-Bread-like dinner rolls with portion-control oleo pats served at an American-Chinese restaurant. Get ready for magenta spareribs and gloppy chicken chow mein.—MCSJB

Roots, Part 3
No ex-pats dining in a restaurant serving their traditional cuisine.—HB
[See: P. F. Chang's—Denv.]

Got it? Good. Now you’re ready for the Dining Deconstructionist’s Bonus Guide, by MC Slim JB (with yet more commentary by Denveater):

SIGNS THAT PEOPLE BELIEVE TO BE REVEALING BUT AREN'T

Reviews as Signage
A glowing review posted in the window. This is only useful if the review is recent and the reviewer trustworthy, not some pay-for-play schmuck like The Phantom Gourmet, or a faceless mob of Zagateers who might also adore P. F. Chang's. Further, some restaurants have been caught posting counterfeit reviews, using Photoshop to convert pans into raves.

Agreed: A “They love us on Yelp!” sticker might as well read, “We paid our monthly advertising bill!” As for Zagat, here’s a little tip from a former editor of the Boston/Cape Cod guides (yes, me)—a sticker reading “Zagat Rated” means, uh, the place has been rated. Likely iffily. If it had been rated highly, the owner would probably have opted to frame the whole review. And to underline Slim’s emphasis on recent reviews: I always do a double take when all the clippings and plaques are years old—who knows what’s changed since then? Case in point: Mare in Boston’s North End, which is lined with banners boasting major accolades—from 2006, when the legendary Marisa Iocco was in the kitchen. The current chef may well be a gem, but those banners don’t reassure me; they aren’t sparkling for him.—Denv.

Crowds—or the Lack Thereof
A full parking lot or a line stretching down the sidewalk. All this certifies is that the joint has connected with some lowest common denominator. As with amateur reviews on Yelp, unless you know the tastes of the enthusiasts, you can't trust the endorsement of the crowd. Most outlets of The Cheesecake Factory have nightly lines out the door, too.

No customers. Plenty of wonderful restaurants, e.g., East Boston's lamented Oran Cafe, never find a following, thanks to a bad location (rough neighborhood, hard to reach, no parking/public transit nearby, unpromising setting like a gas station), seedy physical plant, inept or nonexistent marketing, and/or sheer bad luck. Or maybe it's just really, really new. You may be the first to discover it, to truly appreciate and evangelize it.

Roots, Part 4
A match between the nationality of the chef and the restaurant's cuisine. There are excellent Japanese restaurants with Chinese chefs, swell Cajun restaurants with Vietnamese chefs, fine French restaurants with American chefs, fine molecular chefs who aren't from Mars. Conversely, many bad Italian restaurants brag about their Italian-native chefs. Non importa, amico mio.

Addendum: Corny Décor. Red-and-white checkered tablecloths in a trattoria, serapes and sombreros in a taqueria, golden dragons galore in a dim sum palace: you’d think such clichés would amount to gigantic red flags, proving the equivalent of foot-tall mounds of Alfredo, stale tri-colored chips with neon kway-soh dip and sweet and sour mystery meat. But for some reason, they don’t, at least not often enough to judge by.—Denv.