221–230 of 374 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hotel restaurants are feature placebo. They are give the impression of added value/fanciness, even if they are rarely accessed by value-conscious guests.
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.
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. sm…
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.
When I moved to the West Village in NYC, the first night I went to a kebab place right by my building. The owner was talkative and friendly and gave me a free cup of ayran. I went back regularly, but the place was almost always empty. Meanwhile, visiting friends would always want to go to a different kebab place just down the block. For the first year I stayed loyal to that friendly kebab shop owner, until one day I…
And the kebab circle of life is complete. People are ruthless when it comes to food prices/quality.
I've observed the following: 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,…
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.
Anecdotally, it's the same for coffee. Office lobby coffee shops are invariably terrible. The decent ones are always at least a 5-10 minute walk away.
OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
Hi there, "OP" here. First off, it's been fun to see this post spread across the interwebs since I first wrote it one caffeine-fueled day just over a week ago (first Menéame, now here) and for the heck of it, I thought I would clarify a few things; This post was (sortof) a meme. Sure, I "understood the assignment" and performed the quick "study" ("analysis" might be more fitting) for the sake of the original post ove…
LOL we may need to update the title of this post, half the top level comments right now are assuming the study confirmed the hypothesis. > 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.
The more generally interesting a topic is the more likely a HN user is to read the article. A study.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'm never going to look at ratings. The only use there is photos of menus, food, and the restaurant itself.
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.