More EatingOutsforSuckers, Green Zebra version

...that eating out is a completely random experience at all but the very best restaurants, and that purely vegetarian joints will almost always be considered "bland."

Why anyone would spend this kind of money at a vegetarian place just proves how foolish people can be with their dining cash. And then they're surprised at the attitude and food?? I don't get it. The staff knows what the place is getting away with...

EatingOutsforSuckers wrote:...that eating out is a completely random experience at all but the very best restaurants, and that purely vegetarian joints will almost always be considered "bland."

Why anyone would spend this kind of money at a vegetarian place just proves how foolish people can be with their dining cash. And then they're surprised at the attitude and food?? I don't get it. The staff knows what the place is getting away with...

Have you eaten at Green Zebra? It's not exactly vegetarian . . .

Last I looked, vegetables were a legitimate food source and prepared correctly, they can be as flavorful as any other edible item. They can also take considerable time and effort to prepare. You should be so lucky to just taste a real tomato or peach, truly pristine at the height of ripeness. Sometimes, less is more. I can assure you that the same effort goes into sourcing vegetables as proteins.

Green Zebra is a good example as are many Indian or Asian Restaurants (Kahn BBQ, Shan and Lao Sze Chuan come to mind immediately with many more to numerous to list) at just how elevated the lowly vegetable can rise. Among the best meals of my life was an all tofu kiaseki meal in Kyoto. Not to be believed.

What is it that you think they're getting away with?

What is it that you think they're getting away with?

Ummm, if you just read back a few posts, I think you'll gather the general tone of people's experiences.

What else do I think they're getting away with? Well, quite a lot considering the tepid reviews from the public. Would you expect this from an "award-winning" chef, and from a place that hasn't been open all that long, but has certainly had time to get the food and service in order?

This is part of my continuing posts about the randomness of the dining experience. Your positive opinion about a random dining experience here will be canceled by someone else's negative opinion. In fact, people are far more likely to post something ho-hum or negative about a place, when it really doesn't count for anything.

This harms the very industry they claim to love and enjoy, especially when you do have chefs who are out there doing good things.

~EOSF

EOSF, are you employed in the industry you're so valiantly defending from our honest opinions?

For what it's worth, my meal at Green Zebra was quite good.

gleam wrote:EOSF, are you employed in the industry you're so valiantly defending from our honest opinions?

For what it's worth, my meal at Green Zebra was quite good.

It's immaterial whether I'm employed in the industry or not. All one has to do is read up the posts to see how ridiculous restaurant opinions can be. They vacillate between positive and negative like an electric current. You yourself say, FWIW, and frankly, it ain't worth much, especially when all you said was "quite good."

Oh, btw, I'm certainly not defending the industry, as you might have noticed from my name.

Cheers!

The randomness of the dining experience is something that most pros understand and try to keep to a minimum. Inconsistency kills restaurants. We are dealing with taste which is subjective, one mans salty is another mans bland, and there is no formula for success, if there were everyone would have it and be successful.

Opinions are equally personal but are valid none the less. Whether you're the public or the pro, you can learn by listening. Marketing studies have shown that a customer with a good experience is likely to tell 2-3 people. That same customer with a bad experience is likely to tell 8-10.

Granted, there are plenty out there though that don't belong in the business and have no idea of what hospitality entails and that skate by on the mediocrity that American culture seems to embrace, or at least not be offended by like it does to me.

In the meantime, the name you choose to post with seems to say it all and again I'm asking, what is it you feel Green Zebra is getting away with?

My point, Jazz, is that so many places like this that turn into "hotspots" do so because they're new, or supposedly innovative, and yet, the reviews here and on other sites run the gamut from lame and mediocre to excellent.

But their prices would seem to reflect something a lot better, from food to service and beyond. Apparently, given the range of reviews (if they're to be believed anyway), this is not the case.

This is what they are "getting away with." But this behavior is typical of the dining public and trendy places anyway.

Your marketing points were excellent, given that they buttress my position. However, you say that people's opinions are valid out here. I say that unless you're a professional reviewer and you understand how restaurants really work, they're not. They're just more likely to be negative if you're willing to write and talk about them.

Cheers!

Well, if you are in the industry, and you've picked LTH to post your screeds about amateur reviewers, I would guess a place you work had some negative reviews, and it would be best to disclose that.

Of course, if you're Phil Vettel, it'd be best to disclose that, too.

The reality is that the menu cost of an item has very little to do with the reviews it gets. While charging what the traffic will bear is obviously considered, cost of ingredients and the labor involved, both active and passive is the main criteria. Then you add your unique margins for rent, utilities, insurance, etc...

That is how it's done and I assure you that when people feel taken advantage of, they stop giving you their business. That is after they tell anyone who'll listen, so no one is getting away with anything, at least for very long. It's also why people turn to something like LTHforum. I believe as a customer you have the right to expect certain things, especially at certain price points and if as a restaurant you can exceed expectations, that if anything is among the formula to success. It's expensive to go out and try every place that may appeal to you. Having a community of fairly like minded individuals you can turn to for informed opinions can be helpful when deciding how to spend your money. As long as you remember it's an opinion about an isolated incident, a snapshot in time.

EatingOutsforSuckers wrote:Your marketing points were excellent, given that they buttress my position.

Hmmm...

EatingOutsforSuckers wrote:However, you say that people's opinions are valid out here. I say that unless you're a professional reviewer and you understand how restaurants really work, they're not.

I'd love to keep the topic of this thread on food - more specifically Green Zebra. However, this is one of the most silly comments I have read on this board.
For what it's worth, many of the board members are professionals within the food industry - or at least peripherally involved (including myself).
Besides, unless the restaurant in question serves professionals only, one diner's opinion is just as valid as another's.

you say that people's opinions are valid out here. I say that unless you're a professional reviewer and you understand how restaurants really work, they're not

Ah yes, the old saw: If you ain't a professional, your opinion's worthless.

Well, I'm all for listening to informed opinions and professionals can certainly contribute enormously to the dialogue. But there are two sides to this transaction, the producer and the consumer, and the consumer has every right to bring his/her critique to the conversation and allow the public (which brings its own level of expertise to the dialogue) to determine its worth. Or, as Samuel Johnson put it:

"You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables."
Boswell: Life

Jazzfood wrote:The reality is that the menu cost of an item has very little to do with the reviews it gets. While charging what the traffic will bear is obviously considered, cost of ingredients and the labor involved, both active and passive is the main criteria. Then you add your unique margins for rent, utilities, insurance, etc...

That is how it's done and I assure you that when people feel taken advantage of, they stop giving you their business. That is after they tell anyone who'll listen, so no one is getting away with anything, at least for very long. It's also why people turn to something like LTHforum. I believe as a customer you have the right to expect certain things, especially at certain price points and if as a restaurant you can exceed expectations, that if anything is among the formula to success. It's expensive to go out and try every place that may appeal to you. Having a community of fairly like minded individuals you can turn to for informed opinions can be helpful when deciding how to spend your money. As long as you remember it's an opinion about an isolated incident, a snapshot in time.

Man, you folks keep agreeing with me, but somehow feel it necessary to put up some BS beforehand.

Your first paragraph is right on except for the first sentence, because often people post reviews on places because they think they should have gotten something more for the price. This is what they write and can hardly be a non-correlation since they themselves wrote it.

Again, for those who are still tuned in, Jazz is correct in saying that those who feel they are being taken advantage of will tell anyone who will listen. And oh god, will they tell, like on this site. But, as Jazz will tell you, their experience is:

As long as you remember it's an opinion about an isolated incident, a snapshot in time

In other words, it means nothing when compared to what your experience might be. The reviews you read here are a false reassurance to your leaning toward or against visiting a particular place. All you have to do is read up the posts/reviews.

I'm not writing for/against. I'm just shedding light on the randomness of the restaurant experience.

Man I couldn't have said it any better. Thanks!

Cheers!

johnny wrote:

EatingOutsforSuckers wrote:However, you say that people's opinions are valid out here. I say that unless you're a professional reviewer and you understand how restaurants really work, they're not.

I'd love to keep the topic of this thread on food - more specifically Green Zebra. However, this is one of the most silly comments I have read on this board.
For what it's worth, many of the board members are professionals within the food industry - or at least peripherally involved (including myself).
Besides, unless the restaurant in question serves professionals only, one diner's opinion is just as valid as another's.

If you want to keep the topic on the food at Green Zebra, stop replying to my posts. Otherwise, I can prove to you that a pro reviewer's opinions are worth more than your random one experience at a given restaurant. It's simple regression to the mean. In other words, your one opinion is only as valid as another's oneopinion.

Why do people have to validate lone, subjective opinions? Because it validates their own.

This is unfortunate for the restaurant business because there is no recourse for the restaurant to rebut simple one-off experiences, especially those that might be asserted by someone with a vendetta or something to prove against a particular establishment. AND yet, the people who post here time and again will say they do so because they love eating out. Whatever....

Cheers!

EatingOutsforSuckers wrote:I can prove to you that a pro reviewer's opinions are worth more than your random one experience at a given restaurant. It's simple regression to the mean. In other words, your one opinion is only as valid as another's one opinion.

Doesn't that prove the opposite of what you say it proves? Namely, that any opinion here is worth just as much as a pro reviewer's opinion?

Or maybe I don't understand your point. Call me dumb. And somehow, even though I've only known you for two days, I sense that you will.

I don't know what the hell he's talking about either.

Here's a mix of comments about Shawn McClain's food, and about the digression to which this thread has turn.

I admire the commitment McClain seems to have toward using fresh, seasonal, and - when possible - local ingredients. He uses classic techniques, executed very well, to bring out the intrinsic characteristics of generally excellent ingredients. A simple, butter poached halibut with lemon, served with sauteed Indiana haricot vert was a perfect example of the above. The moist, perfectly cooked fish was quite good, but - imo - under seasoned - as I find much the food at McClain's restaurants to be. In two visits to Spring and one to GZ, I have consistently found that the kitchen used too tentative a hand with the salt and pepper.

The design of the restaurants is not for me either - style over substance, imo. For example, Spring has gorgeous, gigantic bouquets of fresh flowers throughout the room. While nice too look at, the flowers have such an intense, wafting aroma that it distracts from the food. I want restaurant decor that helps me think about, focus on, and enjoy my food. Perhaps some people go to restaurants more for different reasons. They might like these flowers, and some of the other design elements in McClain's places. Not me.

Here's one of the beauties of review forums like this, which indeed represent a set of individual, moment-in-time perspectives. By itself, you might chalk up my review to some quirky dining bias I have. However, when you look at a collective set of reviews from diverse people with, collectively, a whole lot of moment-in-time experiences, you're able to form a much fuller picture of a restaurant than a single professional reviewer could provide. Several people have reported here that they found GZ's food under seasoned. That's not to say that the next person who walks in will report the same thing, but it's a pretty good warning that if you're a person who likes robustly seasoned food, this might not be the place for you. You can thank the forum for helping you spend your entertainment dollar elsewhere. If you're someone for whom robust seasoning is not a priority, and fresh, seasonal ingredients served in a stylish room are, you might very well come away from this forum thinking that GZ is just your kind of place.

Another great feature of this forum is that it contains reviews from people I have come to know - either personally or through reading their contributions over time. Based on years of participation in the forum, I have found a whole lot of people who tend to share similar opinions about dining to mine. While their reviews don't provide me with a guarantee about a place, they're certainly more meaningful than the opinion of a random professional reviewer with whose work I am relatively unfamiliar. And, if an LTH reviewer steers me wrong, I can chastise him or her to no end at this year's picnic. I'm less likely to get that chance with Vettel, Tomarkin, and the like.

Eatingoutsforsuckers, You're twisting my words to suit yourself and in fact, I do NOT agree with you, your logic or method.

EatingOutsforSuckers wrote:Why anyone would spend this kind of money at a vegetarian place just proves how foolish people can be with their dining cash.

This has got to be the most narrow-minded and insulting statement I have read on these boards in a few months--and I've never even been to Green Zebra...

Is this the first time anyone's met a troll?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_Internet

I'm kind of looking forward to EOFS's diatribes tonight (seems like he/she always posts late at night). It's like the unavoidable fascination you feel while driving past a car wreck.

Just look at the timing of his/her posts. Cardinal rule: Unless they are a shift worker, for the average poster, every hour after midnight that a post is made increases by 33 1/3% the probability that the author was drunk, high or both. Or, of course, just an asshole. The most annoying part of this jerk's posts (besides the ridiculous, dead-end, obviously picked for one-time trolling username) is that there may actually have been an ounce of raciocination lurking under the ethanol, but he/she blew it by feeling the need to add an ad hominem attack to the end of every sentence (not just "X is true" but "X is true, asshole, and you would agree with that if you were not a complete f'ing idiot and a hopeless dork.") If he/she would've stopped with the "X is true" and maybe some reasons why, then maybe we'd feel inclined to engage. I actually saw the kernel or two of an idea or two lurking in some of those posts. But instead, we let our worst nature be brought forth by this poster. Shame on us.

JimInLoganSquare wrote:Cardinal rule: Unless they are a shift worker, for the average poster, every hour after midnight that a post is made increases by 33 1/3% the probability that the author was drunk, high or both. Or, of course, just an asshole.

hey...hey...i'm all of those things and i can keep it in line on here


Seriously, you never know - he sounds like he's been in the industry for too long and hates everyone. It happens - lots of customers are jerks and the fact of the matter is - the bar, restaurant and service industry is just that: A service industry. People pay you to serve them. So, you do it with hospitality.

Once you can't deal with a (sadly, increasingly) rude public, you have to get out. Or, in this case, come to the LTH forum and vent.

When i couldn't take it anymore, i became a medic. Don't do that

JimInLoganSquare wrote:Just look at the timing of his/her posts. Cardinal rule: Unless they are a shift worker, for the average poster, every hour after midnight that a post is made increases by 33 1/3% the probability that the author was drunk, high or both.

I'm in full agreement with you, Jim, but the timing could also indicate someone in the restaurant business, despite this person's statements to the contrary. You can take your lemons and make lemonade, your grapes and make wine...or you can just be sour....

My problem with EOFS's posts had nothing really to do with their substance. Frankly, I found the whole thing to be abstruse, industry-insider stuff that holds little interest for me. My issue was that EOFS came on the board with an agenda and used the forum to publish it. And from what I gleaned, he or she was way off-target in choosing LTH to vent. The posts, whether you agree with them or not, seem to be aimed more at sites like Yelp or Metromix, which tend to be more snapshotty and more negative than LTH. On balance, LTH is a lot more about discovering wonderful little neighborhood restaurants than it is nitpicking about service issues at $60/pp-type places in River North. That's how I use it, at least.

djenks wrote:Once you can't deal with a (sadly, increasingly) rude public, you have to get out.

Well, there's an idea I'm interested in seeing discussed. Is the restaurant-going public, in fact, increasingly rude? I haven't noticed that. There's no question rude people exist, but are they showing up at restaurants in any greater frequency than they did in the past? Being but one member of the public myself, I'm not in as good a position to judge this as a restaurant proprietor would be, but I haven't noticed any special decline. Maybe the proprietors/managers/staff among us can tell us.

EatingOutsforSuckers wrote:
It's immaterial whether I'm employed in the industry or not. All one has to do is read up the posts to see how ridiculous restaurant opinions can be. They vacillate between positive and negative like an electric current. You yourself say, FWIW, and frankly, it ain't worth much, especially when all you said was "quite good."

So what you're saying is that your opinion has value and is valid but no one else's is?

Yeah thats great.

riddlemay wrote:

djenks wrote:Once you can't deal with a (sadly, increasingly) rude public, you have to get out.

Well, there's an idea I'm interested in seeing discussed. Is the restaurant-going public, in fact, increasingly rude? I haven't noticed that. There's no question rude people exist, but are they showing up at restaurants in any greater frequency than they did in the past? Being but one member of the public myself, I'm not in as good a position to judge this as a restaurant proprietor would be, but I haven't noticed any special decline. Maybe the proprietors/managers/staff among us can tell us.

When I taught an online writing class, one of the assignments was to write a classification essay and one of the topics was "Types of Customers." Many of my students worked in service-type industries, like restaurants, and I was appalled that almost all created taxonomies of customers suggested a range that went from something like Stupid to something like Monstrous. It's possible the student writers were exaggerating for comic effect (or that they worked in places that may attract such a clientele), but based on this admittedly anecdotal experience, I have come to believe that many servers out there find the public to be boorish at best.

More people are eating out than used to, this is a fairly well documented trend.

I wonder if it is related to the fact that we don't actually need this one particular restaurant. If I don't like it, I can go to another. So perhaps we see restaurants as disposable, and unfortunately, the people who work there as under our "pay" and thus subject to our whims. Or maybe it's related to money.

I've been in 2 different service sort of professions - I taught school, and I do tech support (internal to our department). When I taught, at an expensive private school, I definitely got rudeness from parents and students. A strong sense of "I'm paying xxx for this, and you'd better deliver." As a tech support person, my customers don't have much of an option to go elsewhere but I do find them very kind, understanding, and even when frustrated, for the most part they are appreciative. There is no money being exchanged, as there might be if I worked for the central University computer group, or if I worked for Best Buy and someone went there with their personal computer.

Just some observations...



OT digression - should that be "well-documented"?