stars and what they really mean

its interesting to compare the stars given restaurants in Chicago by the big three. I believe Chicago Mag is the most credible and difficult to please(only 19 restaurants 3 stars or higher) where Bruno sometimes inexplicably gives poor restaurants big ratings(Butterfield 8, 3 stars),and Vettel is usually sound but unpredictable at times.

Dining Out is a great book about critics and how they work, conceal themselves, come up with ratings etc.

chicago Mag's 4 star restaurants
Trotters
Tru
Avenues
Topolambampo
Everest
spiaggia

It seems like you have to be a certain kind of restaurant to achieve 4 stars, many restaurants can do what they do perfectly without being built to be 4 stars.

That's why forums like this exist. IMO, there are plenty of three and four star restaurants out there from a food perspective that might not have the ambience of those of the list.

Chicago magazine is for Foodies. While LTHers certainly enjoy a great meal at a top restaurant, we realize that there's a whole world of great food served out there on plastic tablecloths. Maybe no tablecloth at all.

Farmerfood and YourPalWill are both right. For mainstream publications, you do have to be a certain kind of restraurant to gain four stars. I was just thinking of this as I was reading Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires (her new book about being a food critic at the Times).

Ruth writes about the exquisitely wonderful food that she ate at Honmura An, a Japanese soba noodle joint. She finds the food amazing, astonishing, and yet when we reach the end of the review, we learn that she gave the restaurant 3 stars, and that, it appears, was a scandal. Why not four stars? Well, for readers of the Times, she would have been seen as more crazed than she was unusually seen. Ethnic restaurants operate on a two-star model in critical culture ("good" and "great for their kind"). Whether they should be is another question.

When I was reviewing restaurants (long ago) in Philadelphia, giving my highest rating to Le Bec Fin would have raised no eyebrows, but finding a glorious Chinese restaurant or an Italian "dive" near the Italian market that deserved such praise would have been thought eccentric.

In part this is a function of traditional (elite) standards of service and decor that are filtered into reviews (consider when Phil Vettel compared Tru and Trotters two weeks ago), he considered the greeting and the gifts that he was given to take home, as well as the service. [I don't mean to suggest that service at LTH, Spoon, Honey 1, or at Hot Dougs, isn't just fine, but it is not a performance, just damn good work].

Critics write for audiences, and their audiences overlap with - but are not the same as - ours.

This thread inspired me to go looking for a fascinating article I once read on the impact of Michelin stars, "Teetering at the Summit in France" by Frank J. Prial, and I found an online copy here:

http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/jan99/0279.html

When I first read it, I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Claude Lebey, a Paris restaurant critic, recalled Bocuse's
complaining one summer, when all his guests were dining outside on
the terrace, that in keeping with Michelin standards, his empty
dining room was still filled with flowers. "Each day," he said, "I
spend a fortune on flowers that are seen only by people going to
the bathroom."

It reminds me of a friend's remark, as we dried our hands in the ladies' room at Le Titi de Paris: "For $20 more a plate, we could have cloth towels."

Re-reading it now, of course, what strikes is that four years after this piece was written, when his restaurant was downgraded by Gault-Millau, Chef Bernard Loiseau committed suicide.

Michelin, of course, doesn't rate Chicago restaurants. Here are the current top ratings from the two guides that do:

Mobil Five-Star Restaurants

* Charlie Trotter's, Chicago
* Trio, Evanston

Mobil Four-Star Restaurants

* Ambria, Chicago
* Crofton on Wells, Chicago
* Everest, Chicago
* Les Nomades, Chicago
* The Dining Room, Chicago
* Seasons, Chicago
* Spring, Chicago
* Tru, Chicago

AAA Five Diamond Award Restaurants:

* Arun's, Chicago
* Charlie Trotter's, Chicago
* Everest, Chicago
* Seasons Restaurant (in the Four Seasons Hotel Chicago)
* Tru, Chicago

AAA Four Diamond Award Restaurants:

* Allen's - The New American Café, Chicago
* Ambria, Chicago
* Atwater's, Geneva
* Avenues, Chicago
* Carlos', Highland Park
* Erawan, Chicago
* Les Nomades, Chicago
* Le Titi de Paris, Arlington Heights
* mk, Chicago
* Nick's Fishmarket, Rosemont
* NoMI, Chicago
* Shanghai Terrace, Chicago
* Spiaggia, Chicago
* Spring, Chicago
* The Dining Room, Chicago
* The Pump Room, Chicago
* Tallgrass, Lockport
* Topolobampo , Chicago
* Yoshi's Cafe , Chicago
* Zealous, Chicago

The first thing that strikes me is that besides French/Alsatian, Mobil includes no ethnic restaurants. Not even Spiaggia, the city's poshest Italian place, makes their list. AAA, which awards many more restaurants with its top honors, does include several of Chicago's swankiest Asian restaurants, the highest-end Mexican and Spiaggia. Neither list includes a steakhouse.

Both of these guidebooks offer some objective criteria behind their rating systems, much more so, I suspect, than is attached to the typical review in a magazine or newspaper. Here's what they say about them:
http://www.mobiltravelguide.com/mtg/ind ... dytid=1032
http://www.ouraaa.com/news/news/diamond ... teria.html

I suspect it's guides like this that led to the star system we see used less objectively with other publications' reviews. Stars are also a quick, shorthand way of describing quality in a way that readers too lazy to read the complete review can pick up on; it gives them a fast means of making comparisons.

For those interested in the Losieau suicide, a new book on his life and death has just been published (and available from Amazon):

Rudolph Chelminski, The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine (New York: Gotham, 2005).

Also, late this year Michelin will be issuing their Red Guide to New York City - can Chicago be far behind.

laz wrote (I could also quote some of what gaf wrote here, too)

Both of these guidebooks offer some objective criteria behind their rating systems, much more so, I suspect, than is attached to the typical review in a magazine or newspaper. Here's what they say about them:
http://www.mobiltravelguide.com/mtg/ind ... dytid=1032
http://www.ouraaa.com/news/news/diamond ... teria.html

There is an attempt, particularly on the part of guidebooks (pioneered by Michelin, I believe) to define and apply "objective" criteria to the evaluation and rating of restaurants. The idea has appeal (I am trained as an engineer, after all) - come up with a defined rating system that allows one to easily measure every restaurant in the world against every other one.

This reminds me of a story a programming friend of mine loves to recount. He was once engaged by Sara Lee to design a reject accounting system for them to track product that failed their quality control process. In the information gathering phase, he was given their quality criteria, and reasons for rejection. They fell into a number of categories, visual, size.. and taste. When given this, he replied the project would be a failure and there was nothing he could do about it. The Sara Lee staff reacted with surprise as they thought it was quite doable, how could he say this, etc. He replied, smart ass techie that he is, "how can we create a reject accounting system for these criteria, when we all know there is no accounting for taste..."

An awful joke, though his brass in actually using it in a business meeting (he really did) deserves some form of credit. But the point is that an objective rating system must rely on measurable criteria. Perforce, this misses the most important criteria, for me anyway, deliciousness. Cantu and Achatz, for example, may both offer the same level of service, beauty and comfort in their dining rooms, use the same sources for food, and be just as technically proficient and innovative in the kitchen. But if one has the knack for combining flavors in a way I find both delightful and interesting, while the other offers interesting and challenging food that I do not find delicious, my preference is clear, but mostly unmeasurable. (this is meant for illustration only, as I have been to neither Moto or Alinea).

It is useful to know and understand the context of ratings when reading them. For guidebooks, these are often published criteria. For writers, one usually has to familiarize oneself with their body of work to understand what they like and do not like, and how well it tracks with my preferences. The same applies, of course, to my fellow LTH posters who are just as much food critics as any of the professionals.

In general, however, I choose not to study the body of work of any of these people, tho some (Phil Vettel comes to mind) I have come to know fairly well over time. I am more interested in the food than the food writers, after all, and have other ways to spend my time.

So, how do I make use of food and restaurant writing? I suppose the simple explanation is that I avoid judgements and focus on exposition. Details on the actual experience, be it the service, the atmosphere, and of course the food, are of great use. Opinions and conclusions are only useful if the writer is someone I know and trust. And even then, I really want details.

Or to put it in the context of this thread, I cannot say that I even note, much of the time, how many stars, forks or other ratings a writer gives to a place. I scan the text for description and note those details to determine whether it is a place I might enjoy. At times, I have noted, this leads me to a conclusion that is diametrically opposed to that of the writer.

What interests me, then, in a review, is - not really in any hierarchical order, BTW:

Quality of ingredients
Skill of preparation
Comfort and nature of room/space
Nature of, and flavors in, dishes
Price, relative to value (for me this means how much I think I might pay elsewhere for similar food of relatively equal quality - personal note: I rarely am prepared to pay more for the same food in a much nicer setting, but that is me, and is why I have a hard time going to Red Light for instance, when I can find similar and often better food for 1/2 the price in Chinatown)

What interests me much less:

Attentiveness and responsiveness of servers (unless multiple people report the same experience, and even then I put the importance of this way, way, way, below the issue of deliciousness - there is even a certain pleasure in the experience of being abused by servers in the pursuit of delicious food).

I am sure this is too long to be of interest to most of you, but let me close with this -

Food criticism is a subjective evaluation of an ephemeral experience. It suffers from two inherent problems - first, that the specific experience is not necessarily representative of any other experience. So to be most useful, it needs to encompass as many experiences as possible.

Second, it is the reviewer's expression of the experience, a subjective recounting of one's impressions of an ephemeral experience if you will.

So I look for multiple visits, lots of details, and entertaining writing. Comparisons can be useful, but usually on a very specific level (ex: I found Blackbirds' pork belly reminiscent of the braised pork at Mandarin Kitchen, though with a more savory and less sweet flavoring, and a more tender texture).

Screw the ratings, they are just there to draw in people who do not really care about the food or making judgements for themselves, IMO. And the four star collectors are a singularly sad group, I think.

Having said that, I do use Guide Michelin because I feel I can anticipate what the restaurant will be like based on the ratings and information they provide. But, and this is a large but, for the most part my best meals have been at 1 star restaurants. I guess I am just a simple guy