Zagat was founded by two married lawyers who dined out as a hobby. As the story goes, in , Nina and Tim Zagat were hosting a dinner party at their New York City home when their friends — also serious diners — started complaining about professional newspaper restaurant critics.
Tim Zagat was struck with a lighting bolt of an idea: instead of relying on just a few opinions for restaurant recommendations, he would poll his friends. They then passed it along to their friends, chain mail style. For the first survey of New York City restaurants, called the NYC Restaurant Survey, amateur critics rated restaurants on food, decor, service, cleanliness, and cost.
Cleanliness was eventually dropped as a category. They also provided the comments that Tim and Nina Zagat used to form collectively written, paragraph-long restaurant reviews. At the time, the survey was groundbreaking. In , the Zagats produced 10, copies of their self-published survey and distributed them to bookstores, according to an Edible Manhattan profile. For years, the couple worked as lawyers who peddled dining guides on the side, but by , both transitioned to focus on the Zagat guide full time.
Ten years in, the survey had expanded to cover multiple cities, including Boston and Chicago, and paperback Zagat surveys were widely available at bookstores as well as in checkout lines and coffee shops. The survey results mattered, too. A Zagat guidebook starred in a Saturday Night Live sketch , in which a married couple, played by Chris Farley dressed as a woman and Adam Sandler, bicker about which Zagat-recommended restaurants to visit for their 35th wedding anniversary.
When Brooklyn restaurant the Grocery got a near-perfect Zagat score of 28 in , the news appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Restaurants, naturally, also cared about their Zagat ratings. Along with a score of 9 for food, the people at Zagat published this offending review:. The judge dismissed the case because a restaurant review — even one assembled from multiple anonymous opinions — does not constitute libel.
When Zagat hit the internet, it put its survey results — the very things that powered it through decades of relevance — behind a paywall. Online, not as many people cared that Zagat was the original user-generated food review outlet, when new user-generated food review outlets, like Yelp, provided content for free.
The latest self-inflicted wound is the most recent update to the website, which dumbs down the search and filtering functions and limits the data once again to 38 cities. Worst of all, Google is now improving its location-based data independently of Zagat. In fact, Zagat data is no longer to be found anywhere on Google Maps, and Google stopped making it available to third-party app developers two years ago.
It would be unreasonable to expect Zagat to maintain complete dominance over the restaurant discovery scene today, given the explosion in mobile apps and the legitimately valuable features of some of them.
Nevertheless, Zagat has been on a path to irrelevance. TechCrunch — in its only story on Zagat since Google's acquisition, until now — reported on the then-new iOS app in July Yet the Zagat brand and formula of data and crowdsourced curation still have value to a certain audience.
Zagat can have a much brighter future if it goes back to what made it great in the first place while incorporating the right set of digital features in its mobile apps. And The Infatuation is in a great position to make that happen. The Infatuation is a startup that Chris Stang and Andrew Steinthal, both refugees from the music industry, began in Its original formula was rather like the old Gault-Millau Guides in France: a small group of self-appointed critics reviewing restaurants and assigning numerical ratings.
The Infatuation added a couple of twists for the digital age: decimal points in the ratings to make them look "data-driven" even though only a small group of humans generated the data, a good mobile user interface with location-based features and practical "this restaurant is good for More recently, The Infatuation has added various savvy social media features, such as human-generated restaurant recommendations by text message and Instagram feeds for the cities they cover.
And its coverage has grown from seven U. The Infatuation understands the synergies between human input and automation that make a great restaurant review service, and they know how to build good user experiences. And they don't appear to be interested in expanding to airlines, hotels, and golf courses, let alone general location-based data services.
They're food people, focused on restaurants. In other words, this could be the start of a great turnaround for Zagat and a boon to foodies everywhere. I'll finish with some suggestions for steps The Infatuation can take to save Zagat from oblivion:.
Above all, go back to Zagat's core strengths: make Zagat a brand and destination for foodies again. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. Sep 30, , pm EDT. Sep 26, , pm EDT. Sep 25, , pm EDT. Sep 24, , pm EDT. Sep 18, , pm EDT. Question, do you work with local marketers that share the same ideals? I run the largest food and cocktail promotion gig in Rochester, NY, that focuses on only the best.
All photography, content, and relationships are handled solely by me. I won't post anything I don't love, so there is no negativity, and my followers expect that level of integrity. The scene has been growing hand over fist here, and it would be killer to get more coverage outside of the area. Hacker News new past comments ask show jobs submit.
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