We buy our own coffee and equipment. The quality is constant. The only variable is our mood, which might affect the measurement from jug to jug, resulting in slight taste variations.
The last office I worked in not only had terrible coffee, but the machine had a touch screen and required network connectivity and regularly crashed, prohibiting all dispensation of coffee. It also reportedly came with a 5 figure monthly operating cost.
The coffee in the lobby was only slightly better, but at least the baristas didn’t crash during their OTA updates.
A 10 minute walk away and you’d find the best coffee for at least a couple miles around.
High mass-transit corridor real-estate (rail, air, road) leases come at a premium so those higher fixed-costs and must be balanced against a higher-volume of less-breadth of service with the same fixed (or even slightly higher) labor costs.
In food service, high-volume is (mostly) inversely correlated with quality.
Reviews probably have too much noise. It's not only the food that gets rated and people taking the time to rate a place might be doing so because of a particularly good or bad experience they just had. It's not really a day to day thing.
> Reviews have a lot of noise, but it feels like it’s still the best source, unless anyone can recommend a better alternative.
I honestly hate this take, sure, it might be the best (easily available, broad enough thing), but it's not my point, I'm not shutting this down, but giving a remark on what kind of drawbacks should be considered when analysing this, not because it's probably the best you should assume it's perfect.
Not true -- restaurant reviews have a lot of signal. Generally an average score is quite reliable once you hit 100 or so reviews. Even 50 reviews is a pretty decent signal.
not always... the data is skewed by non natives, e.g. a high concentration of americans will typically result in junk food scoring too high, high scoring asian food in the west tastes nothing like what it should, for authentic tastes the scores will be quite mid
That's not skew. That accurately reflects "non-native" clients, who are people too.
> a high concentration of americans will typically result in junk food scoring too high
You do realize that America has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants per capita? Way to stereotype
> high scoring asian food in the west tastes nothing like what it should
Are you also going to criticize Japan for not making American BBQ like "what it should"?
You're showing yourself to be extremely prejudiced against all sorts of other nationalities, and against the creative outcomes when nationalities mix. But people have different tastes from whatever you think is "right", and that's OK.
>You do realize that America has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants per capita? Way to stereotype
How did you find this data? A quick google says that France has about 630 Michelin restaurants and the US about 230 (and obviously fewer people live in France). It looks like Switzerland has the highest per capita with 143 for about 9 million people.
The US has a lot of good eating places, but let's stick to facts.
Maybe, I've heard statisticians say that 30 samples the mean is pretty much unlikely to change, but that's not the issue here, but that what we are measuring goes beyond food quality and gets skewed towards experiences
1) An alarming number of regions in the world have a pizza joint called "New York Pizza", "Manhattan Pizza", or similar.
2) The similarity of the pizza therein to the actual thin, greasy slices served up in pizza joints from actual New York is inversely proportional to the location's distance from New York.
So, the New York Pizza in Boston -- pretty close. The New York Pizza in Brisbane, QLD is alien by comparison and I think they consider "pepperoni" and "salami" interchangeable down there.
While the work provides some additional data, it does little more than re-propose an already-common hypothesis — that pizza which is closer in distance is also closer in flavor. The author is searching for the minimum publishable unit, and misses even that mark. I advise against publishing.
>The New York Pizza in Brisbane, QLD is alien by comparison and I think they consider "pepperoni" and "salami" interchangeable down there.
It gets even worse south of brisbane in Logan.
We have like, one wholesale supplier of "Halal Beef Pepperoni" and all the non chain pizza shops down here seem to have standardised on it, to appeal to the local religious sensibilities.
Its like eating a damp meat flavoured rag. It has no spice to it.
We have a "Brooklyn Slice" opening up, and they seem to be advertising normal salami. If its spicy at all, it will change the game.
He didn't find a correlation, or rather found that there is no correlation, between proximity to a railway station and how the kebab is reviewed. It's a nice study for a statistics class!
As far as I can tell, his study is looking for a correlation with the distance to Metro stations.
This is a big difference. There are hundreds of Metro stations in Paris. Everywhere is close to one.
I think the original intent was distance to a train station. If Paris is anything like Rome, close to the railway station is cheap hostels and recent immigrants accommodations.
The original data includes "train and metro stations", but figure 9 filtered the data to only include train stations and arrived at the same conclusion.
That saying in France is usually understood to be for cities outside of Paris and only referring to "Gares" (that word is used for train stations, not for subway stations). Anecdotally, I'd say it holds true in general in most cities I've visited (with Paris being an exception)
There may not be a correlation, but you can clearly see that the bottom-right quadrant of the plot is basically empty, which is an important insight.
A more accurate aphorism would be "You can sell good kebabs anywhere, but you can only sell bad kebabs near a train station."
And if you look at the "minimum viable quality" instead of the overall quality, there does seem to be a linear correlation with the distance. You can use a 5% quantile regressor to easily find the lower edge of the distribution.
> "You can sell good kebabs anywhere, but you can only sell bad kebabs near a train station."
Insightful!
97.38% of bad studies measure the wrong variable.
Do drunk french people buy kebabs? In my city one central late night kebab place has great kebabs. Anecdotally I remember one great kebab cart serving at least one drunken customer in Nice (France) - not near a station and a long way from the Paris metro!
I think there's some population selection flaws. Drunk people don't leave reviews. In foreign countries it is difficult to know the correct search term.
I suggest an alternative study: how much lager does it need to make a train station kebab taste great?
Source: lived in France for two years. Bought a lot of kebabs. Drank with French people a lot.
Also, I really miss French kebabs. They use the thick pide bread, and harissa sauce is always available. Also, if you order an "American" one, they put fries in it.
> but you can clearly see that the bottom-right quadrant of the plot is basically empty, which is an important insight.
I don't think so? It's mostly a result of the fact that (obviously) the best place to sell food is where there are people, which is also the best place to put a metro station. So on average the kebabs are pretty good and on average they're near a station. In Figure 9 one of the worst reviewed restaurants is over 3km from a metro.
You're likely seeing a pattern where there isn't one, which is normal for humans.
There's one obvious place to go around here for a good kebab, it's a few minutes walk to the station, but the way you can tell it's the best place for a kebab is how late it's open every night. Long after other kebab places are dark they're still doing enough business to justify remaining open.
The best place for pizza in my city is very close to a train station but that's a total accident, they park (it's a van, no really, best pizza in the city but they hated owning a restaurant so they put their oven in a van instead) in the car park of a railway station's pub about five minutes walk from me.
> Long after other kebab places are dark they're still doing enough business to justify remaining open.
Is that a quality signal, or just a sign they don't mind selling to people going back from parties, in various stages of being drunk? I always assumed the latter. Few restaurants (McDonald's and KFC aside) want to work those hours, so whichever does is almost guaranteed a steady trickle of customers who literally have nowhere else to eat (other than home). There isn't much pressure for quality in this situation.
The KFC next to them shuts long before they do. The nearest McDonalds (a drive through) is 24/7 but I've been there late at night and it's extremely quiet. Moreover neither sells kebabs, whereas plenty of places which do sell kebabs in this part of the city close earlier.
However, thinking about it more carefully, while I've never bought a kebab from them technically the Chaiiwala which is 24/7 does sell kebabs. They're a bit fancier (and of course, more Indian) than the kebab you'd get from the kebab shop but that's definitely a chicken kebab. Their clientèle in the middle of the night are a mix of "gig workers" and people either going to or coming back from prayers (for whichever of the religions is into praying when other people are in bed - Islam and maybe others?). I have never seen drunk young people in there, but it is open 24/7 so that must happen once in a while.
> but the way you can tell it's the best place for a kebab is how late it's open every night
That logic definitely does not apply to SF Bay Area. Most of the places that stay open are all pretty meh. A few pizza by the slice places, Dennys, Grubstake, Orphan Andy's, Mel's. Oakland and LA (SoCal) are no better.
AFAIK most places have no interest in staying open late. Maybe they don't want to stay up. Maybe they don't want to deal with drunks. So, given there are so few, the few that are open have no competition.
I been to / lived in cities that actually have good late night options. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore. California has a curfew which doesn't help.
Late is a tradeoff. On resteraunt can make a killing serving anyone out but there are not many so two staying open late both go bankrupt from lack of business. Or maybe the area can support two (3? 10?) I don't know the real number but not as many as the daytime lunch crowd.
Wonder whether that's an instance of Berkson's paradox.
Basically nobody bothering to report about Kebab shops that are neither good nor conveniently located. Probably not, but "one quadrant empty" is a handy red flag that you might encounter Berkson's.
Pedantic nitpick: he didn't find a linear correlation.
Let x=[-5..+5] and y=[25,16,9,4,1,0,1,4,9,16,25] (that is, x²). The Pearson correlation coefficient, R², will be zero. We know that y is dependent on x, but isn't linearly dependent.
I mean, it's not true in general if you actually read the article.
> Whilst there are some minor indications that the hypothesis could be correct (eg. many of the absolute worst restaurants being some of the closest) the correlation is simply too weak.
> Not only was my food uncooked but I also discovered a pubic hair in my chips and cheese, then when I proceeded to report the problem, I was chased with a knife. Down Dundas Street.Absolutely scandalous
I am definitely guilty of sometimes clicking "reply" and then reading the linked article to check that I'm not about to essentially tell you what you'd have read or worse, tell you something the article actually debunks.
Hi there, inventor of the kebab plugin for traindeck here. I'm afraid I was the one who introduced the concept of kebab case, way back in the early 1990s. Back then, trains didn't have enough processing power to handle full cuts of meat, so I thought I'd introduce kebabs as a hack, and it ended up taking off! Didn't expect anyone to still be using it. It's always fun to share stories on HN - you never know who you'll meat here.
Heh. You've just captured the reason why (the better) clinical journals explicitly and specifically forbid having a statement of results in the title of a paper.
At least here, the majority of 1-2 star reviews are actually complaining about third-party delivery services like Foodora[1].
Of course the fries will be soggy and the burger luke warm when you got a guy who had to pedal a bike for half an hour to deliver it for you. Like what did you expect?
I don't know if you're joking or not but in case you're not, you can't really keep fries "fresh". Regardless, the point remains that the quality of third party food delivery services shouldn't be considered when studying the quality of restaurants.
This "you have to choose D" ahead of time nonsense is why people distrust and dislike statisticians! Humans have priors on what is "close" that are independent of this particular article. If they had said "See, everything within 5000m" or "everything within 5m" you might have a point but "500m" being a rough definition of "close to a train station" is pretty reasonable.
Running the analysis while adjusting for station size/passenger volume would be interesting: Paris's transit network is very dense and remarkably uniform, so you'd expect a somewhat uniform distribution of quality around train station entrances/exits as a whole. Meanwhile, anecdotally, some of the worst döner I've had in my life was in large/intercity train terminals.
My expectation would be it's the passenger type - if 80% of the people pass through the station never to return, you're going to get quite a different setup than if 80% are daily commuters.
Duh, commuters are just less picky with their food choices, reliably fast service trumps food quality here for obvious reasons. Tourists as mentioned in the article are not that many.
Anecdotally the worst McDonalds Burger I had was with a cold slice of cheese at the Berlin Main Station, while the Döner there was always above par.
I have a hypothesis that "popular" restaurants in tourist heavy cities like Paris, London, Tokyo have google reviews are heavily skewed by these tourists. Basically any place that has over 1-2k reviews and 4.5+ becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. Sometimes you go into a supposedly local place and everyone seated around you is American. I tend avoid places with thousands of reviews therefore or when there are barely any reviews in the local language
The point is, that quality is not the metric here; the metric is google ratings.
I would take a place with a solid 4.6 but hundreds of ratings over a low double digit 4.9 any time.
I sort ratings by worst but look at the reason. If the 1 stars are "the waitress was rude", then that's fine. I'm there to eat. I don't need them to flatter me. If the 1 stars are "the food smelled foul and I saw them mixing leftover soup back into the pot", I know to avoid it. I've seen both of these types a lot.
And I also do a quick sort by newest. If all the newest reviews are tourists, I know to steer clear. Tourists will give a convenience store egg sandwich 6 stars out of five. They'll write a full-on essay about the fine experience they had at a restaurant and saying it's obvious the chef put lots of care into the meal, not realizing it's a local chain restaurant that just pops things in the microwave. Then they'll take off 2 stars at a good place because the chef couldn't make them a gluten-free, rice-free, beef-free, soybean-free chicken burger (also, they have deadly poultry allergies so they can only eat chicken substitutes). I also see loads of these types of reviews.
I've seen this too, a lot of 1-star reviews from customers who wanted some substitution and didn't get it. Seems designed to be abused by unreasonable customers, cause one of those equates to ~3 honest customers saying "meh" with a 3-star review. I'd prefer the restaurant that doesn't have to charge extra to absorb the costs of avoiding that.
Even Google ratings are sometimes gamed nowadays. This wasn't always the case, they used to be reliable. Tripadvisor ratings on the other hand were always garbage.
I recently had some really bad experiences with some fast food places in my corner of the world, at a train station as well.
They all had 4.9 stars but lots of 1 star reviews matching my experience. But also tons and tons of eerily similar 5 star reviews with a generic photo of the counter (no faces, no food) and a random name and glowing review of who "served" them. Which is impossible at those places.
Many years ago I came up with a rule of thumb. Restaurants have three basic strategies, be a known quantity (chain), have a good location, or be actually good.
I've found some gems by looking for the third category.
Given that "near the train" is a good location, that would support this theory.
Recommendations still matter and some tourists are around for a week or two. I'm highly likely to be a repeat customer at any place that is good.
In my experience finding a good restaurant in a tourist zone is not hugely more difficult than finding a good restaurant elsewhere. The search is easier as a tourist in many ways because the selection is often a limited set.
In San Carlos de Bariloche (highly touristy) I adored Alto El Fuego and I want to go back just for that. Don't try L'Italiano Trattoria: I wanted a bad experience for a masochistic change and I certainly got it. Please gain some pleasure that you've never been there. There's a massive difference between the tastes of local tourists and international tourists.
There's a waiter standing outside trying to get people to come in, and I don't mean the reservation / front desk person. No way is it worthwhile for a restaurant with actually good food to pay someone to advertise outside.
They are not mutually exclusive. Counter examples:
- Katz's deli in NYC is incredibly famous, in a great location, and actually has kickass pastrami. The trade-off are relatively high prices and lines down the block
- restaurants with exclusive relationships.
- restaurants that make money another way, e.g. gambling.
- family owned restaurants with legacy rent deals.
- restaurants that cater to niche audiences e.g. small ethnicities and religions
They're not mutually exclusive because they're a triangle.
Cost, Convenience, Quality: Pick 2
This isn't that deep either - convenience and quality are 2 things that cost the restaurant money (either via higher rent, or more expensive ingredients).
You can't do all 3 because you'll never make a profit.
You can't do only 1 or you'll never get any customers.
Is Katz's actually a great location? It is for some--well, many/most places in Manhattan are a great location for some given the density--but it's hell and gone from Midtown, UES, etc. As someone who has visited Manhattan semi-regularly over the years (and even lived there for a summer) I think I've been to Katz's once and would never have described it as convenient.
ADDED: These days, sure, close to Lower East Side and Orchard Street but that sure wasn't primo real estate a few decades ago (including When Harry Met Sally was filmed).
The grand parent post clearly stated it is the poster's "rule of thumb". By definition they are aware that the rules are [likely] "not mutually exclusive". Starting with "these are not mutually exclusive", is what makes this comment so unnecessary. Don't be proud of having listed exceptions to someone's rule of thumb.
Had you started with, "I like that; these are a few exceptions I've observed to your rules that I find interesting", that would be a productive way to start a conversation.
But starting with "these are not mutually exclusive" makes you seem like an ass for having pointed at an exception to something that by definition has exceptions.
It's right in the posting guidelines [1.]
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
>Comments of this quality are getting frustrating.
Yeah I'm not a fan but it's orders of magnitude less frustrating than the people that try to take a very lossy rule of thumb with a fat "better safe than sorry" factor baked in and then do mental gymnastics to try and plug all the massive gaps.
Do you worship the posting guidelines or something? Are you that offended by someone adding information to a post? The forum is a public one, not a 1-1 conversation.
The poster added valuable information, that is interesting and not self-evidently obvious to the average person who doesn't think much about restaurants, that makes the forum more useful to others?
For what it's worth, I interpreted GP's response as trying to build on the rules of thumb by adding some color in the edge cases, I didn't read it as any kind of a dig at the original proposition.
I think it's probably even more close to being the opposite. Well known Restaurants in great locations tend to actually be very good. I think being good and in a good location leads to restaurants being well known. But I also think people claim Chick-fil-a and McDonald's aren't good are lying to themselves. Those restaurants routinely focus-group their food and make sure that it's ranked very high for taste and not just among their fast food counterparts. It an acquired distaste for people not to like it.
Where I live, video slots have infiltrated many restaurants. It is weird!
Even some slightly fancy restaurants have a corner full of slot machines. They must make a small mint to offset putting off diners.
I know what you are thinking: This guy lives in Nevada. Nope. Illinois.
That last category seems to be growing as well nearby. There are 3 Uzbek restaurants in the neighboring towns. 3! All opened within a year of each other, I think.
For kebab some comedian gave the best advice - look at the knuckles of the kebab maker - if they are very hairy it will be good. Then look at the neckline of his shirt - if there are hairs coming out of it - the kebab will be great.
this reminds me my experience: when I went to Salt Lake City and wanted to try Turkish food and picked nearest Turkish restaurant with the the highest reviews from google maps.
Interior was authentic and nice, but the food turned out to be AWFUL, kebab was burnt to ashes, everything food wise was horrible.
When I complained, the cook came back and apologized, and I saw the cook was White American. Not saying all Americans are bad cooks, but in my experience I would have expected turkish chef to cook turkish food for authentic experience and quality.
Have a friend who rates ethnic restaurants by the decor. The fancier the place: the worse the food.
The best places are mismatched chairs and Formica tabletops, menus left over from the previous occupant with a page of badly translated new menu pasted inside.
My family members from Iran and Syria have said that people there cook beef extra because it's usually not very fresh, unless they're rich. So overcooked beef may be the more authentic way, depending on how you look at it. Lamb is more common anyway.
I've been to several great restaurants with "china" and "burma" in their names. also "siam" and "thai" but not actually "thailand" that I can remember.
There’s a bizarrely good place in Dublin called China Sichuan (double whammy; country _and_ region), located in, basically, a business park 20 minutes from the city centre in a tram. It has no business being any good; combo of name and suburban location should condemn it to mediocrity at absolute best.
(They’ve also clearly spent a lot on the decor, which, again, is normally not a great sign in a restaurant. And yet somehow it’s very good. Against the natural order of things.)
Reminds me of Panda Gourmet in DC. It’s near the edge of the city, not accessible by Metro, the name sounds it should be in a mall and it’s attached to a Days Inn budget hotel. And it’s probably the best Chinese restaurant in the city.
This is actually good. Its a very basic rule of thumb for selecting wine: the more regionally specific they get on the label, the more likely the wine is good.
For example, if you see "California" or "Chile" on a <$10 bottle, expect mediocrity. But if it says "Napa Valley", it'll be a little better, and if it also mentions a location or vineyard, it'll be a lot better.
My pet theory is that this is because the more specific the label gets, the more direct the reputation hit for a bad product.
For France and Italy, wine regions and sub-regions often have protective status. This makes a wine more expensive vs. a non-protected wine of comparative quality, but the upshot is that if you see a wine under a protective label, you can be sure of a certain baseline of quality.
I agree. But one exception, a lot of good Syrian restaurants aren't named for a region in Syria, or the country, but some greater region that includes Syria (usually "Shaam").
This supports the inverse square rule for seafood restaurant quality vs. being near the ocean. There are good places, but right on the water? Universally bad.
Less true if you're talking about seafood "shacks." Tons of good places serving lobster rolls and steamers on the ocean in Maine for example. But, yes, for fancier restaurants especially in cities, the best views often don't come with the best food.
El Bulli was considered the best restaurant in the world until it voluntarily closed and it is right on the Mediterranean with a dock. The web site even had directions to reach it by boat.
I wouldn't say universally bad. I live in Seattle, and there are some restaurants on the water that I like.
The way I think about it is this: the restaurant has to pay for the real estate, and that cost must get factored in somehow. Water views aren't cheap. So you can get good food on the water, but you'll be paying for the view.
Shipping of sea food is expensive so even the cheapest distant resteraunt will pay for premium prices since the difference isn't that much. Near the shore you can save buying cheap - but if you know what you are looking for you can buy the best off the boat for cheap.
If this is true at all, it only applies to cities. Many fantastic seafood restaurants are on or near the docks in regions economically dependent on seafood production.
Given lack of other signals, my experience is that TripAdvisor or Yelp is probably better than "they have a cool name." I've been living out of a hotel because of a kitchen fire and, as someone who really wasn't in the habit of eating out around where I live, the recommendations have generally been decent--combines with a neighbor and personal knowledge.
You need like always to read some of the reviews and judge. If sceptical look at the users histories (e.g. I seen perfect 5 star reviews in Google then seen the users were bots even though the comments sounded ok)
Depends on the stakes too: anniversary dinner or grabbing a coffee in a different part of town?
My only rule is that restaurants in hotels are usually mediocre to bad, which fits with your theory. If they have some built-in customer base they don’t have to work as hard at being good.
I remember reading an article that had the theory that Thai restaurants in hotels were usually very authentic under the assumption that the parents were immigrants who wanted the child to inherit the business, but the kid wanted to run a restaurant instead. It would certainly explain why you get Thai restaurants attached to random hotels in the middle of nowhere, at least.
The Thai government practices gastro-diplomacy, they have a program where you set a Thai restaurant up in a foreign country, you can pick from three different packages for size or fanciness of restaurant. It's why you see a lot of the same decorations and similarities between differently owned Thai restaurants, or occasionally a family will own a number in a metro area.
> The Department of Export Promotion of the Thai Ministry of Commerce offers potential restaurateurs plans for three different "master restaurant" types—from fast food to elegant—which investors can choose as a prefabricated restaurant plan.
Yeah. A random mid-range Marriott probably has an utterly boring hotel restaurant serving fairly mid-range mostly boring fare. You get up to the high-end and you're much more likely to get restaurants that don't really seem like hotel restaurants at all.
Hotel restaurants are feature placebo. They are give the impression of added value/fanciness, even if they are rarely accessed by value-conscious guests.
> restaurants in hotels are usually mediocre to bad
This varies strongly region to region (and price level). In America and much of Europe, in most cases, yes. (Exception: tier 1 cities.)
In parts of Asia it varies from being almost rule to being a solid way to avoid great food. Put another way, go where the food-obsessed locals go. If the locals are dining at hotel restaurants, go there. If they're avoiding them for street food, do that.
On a parallel note, crappy little hotel bars are something of a delight to visit, particularly in your home town. You get to meet randos seeing your familiar through fresh eyes and for the first tie, and even if you don't meet anyone interesting, the people watching alone is usually paydirt.
The formal terminology is “selection induced negative correlation”. If a quality score is the sum of two factors, those two factors will tend to be negatively correlated.
Mathematically a trivial example is the equation 1=x+y, where 1 represents some cutoff and could be any value. Clearly x and y are inversely correlated.
Totally agree but I would expand location into convenience. For example, I find restaurants that don't take reservations or have limited hours are often better.
In my head I have a category for reliable restaurants to go to when you are planning something with people and you want to make sure to have a consistent, predictable experience and restaurants that are worth waiting for or going at a weird time.
Based on the empirical evidence from OP, this seems correct. But there's a theoretical argument for why "good location" and "actually good" should be positively correlated:
1. Good locations are more expensive.
2. People are willing to pay more for better food.
3. Therefore (all else equal), better restaurants earn more revenue.
4. Therefore, better restaurants have a higher willingness-to-pay on rent.
5. Therefore, better restaurants will outbid worse restaurants for good locations.
A restaurant that has more money can afford more rent. A restaurant that doesn't have more money can't afford it. So, everything else being equal, better restaurants, making more money, are more likely to rent places that cost more since. Seems pretty straight forward.
it's no different than saying people with higher income, overall, rent/buy housing that costs more.
This falls apart a bit if providing better food costs more. Restaurants with better food may earn more revenue all else being equal but their costs may be higher. People are willing to pay more for the same quality of food in a better location. It makes sense for a the restaurant with worse food to outbid a restaurant with better food because the location is more important to them and they are allocating more money towards towards rent rather than food quality so they have more to spend.
> People are willing to pay more for the same quality of food in a better location
If they know. West Coast bagels have been almost consistently garbage until very, very recently because the people willing to pay up for a great bagel weren't able to pick out those that were freshly boiled. Combine that with the economics of bagels prohibiting boiling and baking to order (hmm...) and you wind up with the necessity of toasting old (but not stale) bagels.
Your logic works in a world with only restaurants. In reality, every other type of business has better margins than restaurants and also competes for the best real estate. So the good restaurant in a good location is soon having their rent hiked and closing down, or has to follow the beaten path: Decrease quality and increase prices.
Sure, there's always exceptions, especially in older cities where the restaurant was established in a great spot a long time ago and is owned by a family. But generally, restaurants have far too low profit margins to remain for long in a top location. And I think all of us know this from experience.
On location, consider discriminating by repeating versus non-repeating flow. Repeat flow tends to encourage good food. If you fuck up the food, you go out of business. Non-repeating flow encourages tourist traps.
I'd be curious about the article's study being re-run with a dummy variable for predominantly commuter versus tourist train stations.
good location = higher rent = food better attract people
I'm not saying that holds up, only that it's not clear to me that "good location" = skimping on actually being good.
To go the other extreme, I guess all the best restaurants in the USA are in Wyoming since they arguably have worst locations (low population density = low traffic) so they must have to concentrate on food. Yea, ... no.
Hmm but is it excellent for kebabs? I'm more a falafel person so can't really judge but I think crystal kebab is the only one and it doesn't do any form of deep fried chickpeas I rate the chinese place over the road though!
This immediately reminds me of Tyler Cowen's book "An Economist Gets Lunch". He infers all sort of rules for profiling restaurant quality.
In fact, he makes this very observation - high foot traffic areas command higher rents, and it's harder to provide both good quality and good value where rents are high. But restaurants that can be successful without good real estate are a green flag.
In a similar vein, in Venice I developed this theory that you could estimate your distance to San Marco by the price of a slice of pizza (more expensive meaning closer). Never tested it, but would be fun to see a heatmap.
A stronger hypothesis to test might be the statement: "the closest kebab to the station is worse than the next farther one", which would be the intuitive implied meaning of the original statement (even though it's not a perfectly accurate interpretation).
Seems like a lot of this could be explained by better food tending to be served in locations with lower commercial real estate prices (I believe Tyler Cowen has written about this).
Has anyone tried Le Train Bleu inside Gare de Lyon station in Paris? It's a very fancy restaurant (French, obviously). Like many such places, the reviews are mixed, but it was plenty to impress my simpleton American expectations. Certainly a step up from the options one might find in Penn Station (at least to me)!
I'm not sure there's a lot of interest in the US for fancy dining in transportation hubs. In fact, airports have generally moved away from fancier dining generally towards fast casual. There is some decent food in the new Moynihan train hall in Penn but certainly no fancy dining.
Wouldn't it be "good, convenient, cheap - pick two" (at most)?
There can be good food near transportation hubs, but it will be more costly. It is difficult to filter out price as a factor in reviews because people can value their money differently, especially tourists.
Heaven is where the cooks are French, the police are British, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the cooks are British, the police are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.
I don't know, I've lived here for a long time and I've been wondering this too. It's like the entire country has been brainwashed long time ago to call these blobs of minced meat that get shaved into skin-like strips kebab - every chippy in the country is guilty of this monstrosity. I'm glad some companies are now starting to appear that make a dent in this, I am forever thankful for a branch of GDK that opened in my city because that's literally the only place that doesn't serve this carboard imitation of a kebab, but yeah I don't get it. People just say "mate it's mint after a night out" - yeah, and so is the real thing???
At least where I live in the UK, kebabs are treated as drunk food, not lunch food. This is completely different to the US where a gyro is treated as a lunch food and always seemed higher quality.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] threadThe coffee in the lobby was only slightly better, but at least the baristas didn’t crash during their OTA updates.
A 10 minute walk away and you’d find the best coffee for at least a couple miles around.
High mass-transit corridor real-estate (rail, air, road) leases come at a premium so those higher fixed-costs and must be balanced against a higher-volume of less-breadth of service with the same fixed (or even slightly higher) labor costs.
In food service, high-volume is (mostly) inversely correlated with quality.
Reviews are the worse way to test this hypothesis except all the others.
I honestly hate this take, sure, it might be the best (easily available, broad enough thing), but it's not my point, I'm not shutting this down, but giving a remark on what kind of drawbacks should be considered when analysing this, not because it's probably the best you should assume it's perfect.
That's not skew. That accurately reflects "non-native" clients, who are people too.
> a high concentration of americans will typically result in junk food scoring too high
You do realize that America has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants per capita? Way to stereotype
> high scoring asian food in the west tastes nothing like what it should
Are you also going to criticize Japan for not making American BBQ like "what it should"?
You're showing yourself to be extremely prejudiced against all sorts of other nationalities, and against the creative outcomes when nationalities mix. But people have different tastes from whatever you think is "right", and that's OK.
How did you find this data? A quick google says that France has about 630 Michelin restaurants and the US about 230 (and obviously fewer people live in France). It looks like Switzerland has the highest per capita with 143 for about 9 million people. The US has a lot of good eating places, but let's stick to facts.
1) An alarming number of regions in the world have a pizza joint called "New York Pizza", "Manhattan Pizza", or similar.
2) The similarity of the pizza therein to the actual thin, greasy slices served up in pizza joints from actual New York is inversely proportional to the location's distance from New York.
So, the New York Pizza in Boston -- pretty close. The New York Pizza in Brisbane, QLD is alien by comparison and I think they consider "pepperoni" and "salami" interchangeable down there.
Mate, spicy snags are spicy snags
Edit: Used the actual aussie word for sausages...
Pepperomi doesn't quite have the same ring to it
I used to live in New Zealand.
It gets even worse south of brisbane in Logan.
We have like, one wholesale supplier of "Halal Beef Pepperoni" and all the non chain pizza shops down here seem to have standardised on it, to appeal to the local religious sensibilities.
Its like eating a damp meat flavoured rag. It has no spice to it.
We have a "Brooklyn Slice" opening up, and they seem to be advertising normal salami. If its spicy at all, it will change the game.
This is a big difference. There are hundreds of Metro stations in Paris. Everywhere is close to one.
I think the original intent was distance to a train station. If Paris is anything like Rome, close to the railway station is cheap hostels and recent immigrants accommodations.
A more accurate aphorism would be "You can sell good kebabs anywhere, but you can only sell bad kebabs near a train station."
And if you look at the "minimum viable quality" instead of the overall quality, there does seem to be a linear correlation with the distance. You can use a 5% quantile regressor to easily find the lower edge of the distribution.
Insightful!
97.38% of bad studies measure the wrong variable.
Do drunk french people buy kebabs? In my city one central late night kebab place has great kebabs. Anecdotally I remember one great kebab cart serving at least one drunken customer in Nice (France) - not near a station and a long way from the Paris metro!
I think there's some population selection flaws. Drunk people don't leave reviews. In foreign countries it is difficult to know the correct search term.
I suggest an alternative study: how much lager does it need to make a train station kebab taste great?
Yes, very much.
Source: lived in France for two years. Bought a lot of kebabs. Drank with French people a lot.
Also, I really miss French kebabs. They use the thick pide bread, and harissa sauce is always available. Also, if you order an "American" one, they put fries in it.
I don't think so? It's mostly a result of the fact that (obviously) the best place to sell food is where there are people, which is also the best place to put a metro station. So on average the kebabs are pretty good and on average they're near a station. In Figure 9 one of the worst reviewed restaurants is over 3km from a metro.
You're likely seeing a pattern where there isn't one, which is normal for humans.
There's one obvious place to go around here for a good kebab, it's a few minutes walk to the station, but the way you can tell it's the best place for a kebab is how late it's open every night. Long after other kebab places are dark they're still doing enough business to justify remaining open.
The best place for pizza in my city is very close to a train station but that's a total accident, they park (it's a van, no really, best pizza in the city but they hated owning a restaurant so they put their oven in a van instead) in the car park of a railway station's pub about five minutes walk from me.
Is that a quality signal, or just a sign they don't mind selling to people going back from parties, in various stages of being drunk? I always assumed the latter. Few restaurants (McDonald's and KFC aside) want to work those hours, so whichever does is almost guaranteed a steady trickle of customers who literally have nowhere else to eat (other than home). There isn't much pressure for quality in this situation.
However, thinking about it more carefully, while I've never bought a kebab from them technically the Chaiiwala which is 24/7 does sell kebabs. They're a bit fancier (and of course, more Indian) than the kebab you'd get from the kebab shop but that's definitely a chicken kebab. Their clientèle in the middle of the night are a mix of "gig workers" and people either going to or coming back from prayers (for whichever of the religions is into praying when other people are in bed - Islam and maybe others?). I have never seen drunk young people in there, but it is open 24/7 so that must happen once in a while.
That logic definitely does not apply to SF Bay Area. Most of the places that stay open are all pretty meh. A few pizza by the slice places, Dennys, Grubstake, Orphan Andy's, Mel's. Oakland and LA (SoCal) are no better.
AFAIK most places have no interest in staying open late. Maybe they don't want to stay up. Maybe they don't want to deal with drunks. So, given there are so few, the few that are open have no competition.
I been to / lived in cities that actually have good late night options. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore. California has a curfew which doesn't help.
Basically nobody bothering to report about Kebab shops that are neither good nor conveniently located. Probably not, but "one quadrant empty" is a handy red flag that you might encounter Berkson's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
Let x=[-5..+5] and y=[25,16,9,4,1,0,1,4,9,16,25] (that is, x²). The Pearson correlation coefficient, R², will be zero. We know that y is dependent on x, but isn't linearly dependent.
> Whilst there are some minor indications that the hypothesis could be correct (eg. many of the absolute worst restaurants being some of the closest) the correlation is simply too weak.
Only if you agree with the article's methodology :)
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g186534-d125...
> Not only was my food uncooked but I also discovered a pubic hair in my chips and cheese, then when I proceeded to report the problem, I was chased with a knife. Down Dundas Street.Absolutely scandalous
> With a mighty Pearson's correlation of 0.091, the data indicates that this could
> be true! If you ignore the fact that the correlation is so weak that calling it 'statistically
> insignificant' would be quite generous.
I actually came to a different conclusion than the author. Here is the way I'm thinking about the presented statistics:
1. There is 17 Kebab shops (out of 400 samples) with a google review lower than 3 stars. Let's call them "bad kebabs".
2. All those "bad kebabs" actually located within 500m from the nearest station. No kebab located in further than >500m is bad.
3. So if you've ever gotten a bad donor kebab, we can safely assume that you have purchased it from a kebab shop near a train station.
Maybe there are so many kebab eaters near a train station that a mediocre kebab offering becomes profitable?
At least here, the majority of 1-2 star reviews are actually complaining about third-party delivery services like Foodora[1].
Of course the fries will be soggy and the burger luke warm when you got a guy who had to pedal a bike for half an hour to deliver it for you. Like what did you expect?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodora
Right, but this is selection bias. There will always exist a distance D from which all bad kebabs are located.
Unless D is provenly chosen _before_ looking at the data, this has no meaning.
One also has to take the kebab density into account.
On the contrary, if everything was within five meters, that would make the finding much more impressive.
Or intuitively: who doesn't lower their standards when they buy a meal at an airport or major train terminal? We all do!
Anecdotally the worst McDonalds Burger I had was with a cold slice of cheese at the Berlin Main Station, while the Döner there was always above par.
When your falafelshop is in the neighborhood you can't be scamming people because you'll quickly become abandoned.
And I also do a quick sort by newest. If all the newest reviews are tourists, I know to steer clear. Tourists will give a convenience store egg sandwich 6 stars out of five. They'll write a full-on essay about the fine experience they had at a restaurant and saying it's obvious the chef put lots of care into the meal, not realizing it's a local chain restaurant that just pops things in the microwave. Then they'll take off 2 stars at a good place because the chef couldn't make them a gluten-free, rice-free, beef-free, soybean-free chicken burger (also, they have deadly poultry allergies so they can only eat chicken substitutes). I also see loads of these types of reviews.
I recently had some really bad experiences with some fast food places in my corner of the world, at a train station as well.
They all had 4.9 stars but lots of 1 star reviews matching my experience. But also tons and tons of eerily similar 5 star reviews with a generic photo of the counter (no faces, no food) and a random name and glowing review of who "served" them. Which is impossible at those places.
I've found some gems by looking for the third category.
Given that "near the train" is a good location, that would support this theory.
we used to go a chinese place and we called it "spicy chicken." everything else on the menu was trash
Recommendations still matter and some tourists are around for a week or two. I'm highly likely to be a repeat customer at any place that is good.
In my experience finding a good restaurant in a tourist zone is not hugely more difficult than finding a good restaurant elsewhere. The search is easier as a tourist in many ways because the selection is often a limited set.
In San Carlos de Bariloche (highly touristy) I adored Alto El Fuego and I want to go back just for that. Don't try L'Italiano Trattoria: I wanted a bad experience for a masochistic change and I certainly got it. Please gain some pleasure that you've never been there. There's a massive difference between the tastes of local tourists and international tourists.
Luckily, those usually go out of business. Un-luckily, you may be a customer first.
- Katz's deli in NYC is incredibly famous, in a great location, and actually has kickass pastrami. The trade-off are relatively high prices and lines down the block
- restaurants with exclusive relationships.
- restaurants that make money another way, e.g. gambling.
- family owned restaurants with legacy rent deals.
- restaurants that cater to niche audiences e.g. small ethnicities and religions
(And others, probably)
Cost, Convenience, Quality: Pick 2
This isn't that deep either - convenience and quality are 2 things that cost the restaurant money (either via higher rent, or more expensive ingredients).
You can't do all 3 because you'll never make a profit.
You can't do only 1 or you'll never get any customers.
Two is just right for both buyer and seller.
A fair amount, if the number of exceptions are such that the rule of thumb isn't useful.
A broadly accurate guide or principle. If there are enough exceptions that it is not broadly accurate, it's not a good rule of thumb.
> Did you think you were being helpful?
By doing what?
ADDED: These days, sure, close to Lower East Side and Orchard Street but that sure wasn't primo real estate a few decades ago (including When Harry Met Sally was filmed).
The grand parent post clearly stated it is the poster's "rule of thumb". By definition they are aware that the rules are [likely] "not mutually exclusive". Starting with "these are not mutually exclusive", is what makes this comment so unnecessary. Don't be proud of having listed exceptions to someone's rule of thumb.
Had you started with, "I like that; these are a few exceptions I've observed to your rules that I find interesting", that would be a productive way to start a conversation.
But starting with "these are not mutually exclusive" makes you seem like an ass for having pointed at an exception to something that by definition has exceptions.
It's right in the posting guidelines [1.]
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
[1.] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah I'm not a fan but it's orders of magnitude less frustrating than the people that try to take a very lossy rule of thumb with a fat "better safe than sorry" factor baked in and then do mental gymnastics to try and plug all the massive gaps.
Christ this website can be so full of insufferable pedantry. I don't know why people think that such comments are a good contribution.
> "contextualize for a good old-fashioned shitfight about the internet. Hackernews does software they vote on their eggs in Google's ultimate"
I'm unwilling to share that json here, because of the implications.
btw i remembered both of you that mentioned it this week, and got up and pwshed it out.
The poster added valuable information, that is interesting and not self-evidently obvious to the average person who doesn't think much about restaurants, that makes the forum more useful to others?
- restaurants that are going to fail but have not done so quite yet
That covers a lot of restaurants. It's a business sector with a lot of churn. Many mediocre establishments hold on for a few years before they close.
Even some slightly fancy restaurants have a corner full of slot machines. They must make a small mint to offset putting off diners.
I know what you are thinking: This guy lives in Nevada. Nope. Illinois.
That last category seems to be growing as well nearby. There are 3 Uzbek restaurants in the neighboring towns. 3! All opened within a year of each other, I think.
Also, the lowest scoring outliers were the closest proximity, which I think is noteworthy.
Second rule of thumb: if the milkshakes are good, the food will be good - almost never fails me.
Interior was authentic and nice, but the food turned out to be AWFUL, kebab was burnt to ashes, everything food wise was horrible.
When I complained, the cook came back and apologized, and I saw the cook was White American. Not saying all Americans are bad cooks, but in my experience I would have expected turkish chef to cook turkish food for authentic experience and quality.
The best places are mismatched chairs and Formica tabletops, menus left over from the previous occupant with a page of badly translated new menu pasted inside.
(They’ve also clearly spent a lot on the decor, which, again, is normally not a great sign in a restaurant. And yet somehow it’s very good. Against the natural order of things.)
This is actually good. Its a very basic rule of thumb for selecting wine: the more regionally specific they get on the label, the more likely the wine is good.
For example, if you see "California" or "Chile" on a <$10 bottle, expect mediocrity. But if it says "Napa Valley", it'll be a little better, and if it also mentions a location or vineyard, it'll be a lot better.
My pet theory is that this is because the more specific the label gets, the more direct the reputation hit for a bad product.
For France and Italy, wine regions and sub-regions often have protective status. This makes a wine more expensive vs. a non-protected wine of comparative quality, but the upshot is that if you see a wine under a protective label, you can be sure of a certain baseline of quality.
The way I think about it is this: the restaurant has to pay for the real estate, and that cost must get factored in somehow. Water views aren't cheap. So you can get good food on the water, but you'll be paying for the view.
Conversely, I have one piece of life advice for you: Don't eat seafood in Alice Springs.
Depends on the stakes too: anniversary dinner or grabbing a coffee in a different part of town?
from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culinary_diplomacy#Thailand
This varies strongly region to region (and price level). In America and much of Europe, in most cases, yes. (Exception: tier 1 cities.)
In parts of Asia it varies from being almost rule to being a solid way to avoid great food. Put another way, go where the food-obsessed locals go. If the locals are dining at hotel restaurants, go there. If they're avoiding them for street food, do that.
On a parallel note, crappy little hotel bars are something of a delight to visit, particularly in your home town. You get to meet randos seeing your familiar through fresh eyes and for the first tie, and even if you don't meet anyone interesting, the people watching alone is usually paydirt.
Mathematically a trivial example is the equation 1=x+y, where 1 represents some cutoff and could be any value. Clearly x and y are inversely correlated.
In my head I have a category for reliable restaurants to go to when you are planning something with people and you want to make sure to have a consistent, predictable experience and restaurants that are worth waiting for or going at a weird time.
1. Good locations are more expensive.
2. People are willing to pay more for better food.
3. Therefore (all else equal), better restaurants earn more revenue.
4. Therefore, better restaurants have a higher willingness-to-pay on rent.
5. Therefore, better restaurants will outbid worse restaurants for good locations.
it's no different than saying people with higher income, overall, rent/buy housing that costs more.
If they know. West Coast bagels have been almost consistently garbage until very, very recently because the people willing to pay up for a great bagel weren't able to pick out those that were freshly boiled. Combine that with the economics of bagels prohibiting boiling and baking to order (hmm...) and you wind up with the necessity of toasting old (but not stale) bagels.
Also, compare any big city to its adjacent areas. Like everyone knows LA has better food than San Bernardino.
Every kebob is a good kebob when you’re a few drinks in.
Sure, there's always exceptions, especially in older cities where the restaurant was established in a great spot a long time ago and is owned by a family. But generally, restaurants have far too low profit margins to remain for long in a top location. And I think all of us know this from experience.
I'd be curious about the article's study being re-run with a dummy variable for predominantly commuter versus tourist train stations.
I'm not saying that holds up, only that it's not clear to me that "good location" = skimping on actually being good.
To go the other extreme, I guess all the best restaurants in the USA are in Wyoming since they arguably have worst locations (low population density = low traffic) so they must have to concentrate on food. Yea, ... no.
In fact, he makes this very observation - high foot traffic areas command higher rents, and it's harder to provide both good quality and good value where rents are high. But restaurants that can be successful without good real estate are a green flag.
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g187147-d11097...
Not sure I disagree as a traveler.
There can be good food near transportation hubs, but it will be more costly. It is difficult to filter out price as a factor in reviews because people can value their money differently, especially tourists.
Heaven is where the cooks are French, the police are British, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the cooks are British, the police are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.