Tag Archives: restaurant ratings

The Need for a Methodology

I have spent the last ten years scoring thousands of wines. I am also a serious Foodie, but as a trained Somm, I have looked at that experience through the lens of wine pairing. My wine training courses and evaluation took place at The Art Institute in conjunction with a chef training program, so I have always viewed the two pieces of food and beverage service as a whole. My perspective has broadened since visiting Italy and being exposed to the Slow Foods culinary movement. Recently, I decided to begin including fine dining in my evaluation, as I realized… it is rare for me to enjoy a bottle of wine apart from food. After starting the journey down this path I realized, if I am going to start evaluating food/food service, I needed to apply a methodology (like the 20 pt. UC Davis wine scoring system) to be fair and score with consistency. I went looking and found Department of Health score cards and forms for evaluating internal restaurant processes, but could not find consumer judging, or scoring sheets. If anyone reading this knows of a restaurant scoring template, please share…

Developing a Restaurant Scoring Method

I had to build a list of the factors that had the biggest impact on my dining experience and arrived at the following categories: location, ambiance, cleanliness, server disposition, timeliness of service, menu selection, flavors, balanced/complimentary composition, fresh/light/heavy food character, properly seasoned food and overall quality. I would hope this list is similar for you Foodies out there? Then, I had to select a scale and weight the individual categories. I used the wine scoring systems as a guideline and realized the UC Davis 20 pt. system was too compressed and I needed a 100 pt. system to properly judge the restaurant experience. This is my view of how to weight these categories: Location – 4/100, Ambiance – 8/100, Cleanliness – 8/100, Servers – 16/100, Service – 8/100, Menu – 12/100, Flavors – 16/100, Balance – 8/100, Fresh/Greasy – 4/100, Seasoning – 8/100, Overall Quality – 8/100. Cleanliness should probably be weighted more like 50/100, but that approach would favor mediocre establishments, so I made a compromise. I built common descriptors into each category and loaded this all into a spreadsheet template.

Dining Expense Categories

Then… I realized, not everyone wants to spend $50/pp on a meal, so I went about building a price scale. Scoring info was all over the web on this issue, but I did make a few personal decisions, to base the price categories on: a TWO course meal, include the cost of tax (5%), tip (15%) and exclude beverage and dessert. I concluded, not everyone is eating dessert today and it made sense to throw in an average tax/tip amount to provide a full price picture.

Scoring vs. Rating

It then occurred to me, it was important in fine dining evaluation to have both a scoring system AND a rating system. So, I developed a separate rating system incorporating the scoring system described above (see below). Here is my effort to complete comprehensive rating charts:

Wine

97 – 100	Exceptional
92 – 96	Excellent
89 – 91	Enjoyable
85 – 88	Passable
80 – 84	Barely Acceptable
74 – 79	Choke it Down
50 – 73	Flawed

Restaurant / Food

97 – 100	Exceptional	3 Star Equivalent
92 – 96	Excellent	2 Star Equivalent
88 – 91	Enjoyable	1 Star Equivalent
82 – 87	Passable	Diner Quality
77 – 81	Barely Acceptable	Poor Diner Quality
72 – 76	Dump	Dive
50 – 71	Should Close	Nuf Said

$	$20 and under
$$	$20 to $30
$$$	$30 – $50
$$$$	$50 and over

I hope you found my process of some interest. I enjoyed putting this system together and will be using it religiously moving forward. Let me know if you have a different viewpoint on this topic, think I should be tweaking a few areas, or believe I am totally out of my mind (entirely possible).

BON APPETIT!