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Nathan

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Everything posted by Nathan

  1. might agree with you....I think Ssam Bar was at its strongest last year.
  2. Nathan

    Clover Club

    yes, Guiseppe knows what he's doing. pity (from my perspective) that he won't be at Flatiron...
  3. its always a dilemma for restaurants...especially small ones. flash photography can be extremely annoying. someone with a DSLR and a fast lense shooting at a high ISO can get excellent pics without disrupting anyone....but there aren't too many people carrying those into restaurants...
  4. Nathan

    Matsugen

    Of course the answer to your question means little until we first determine how Matsugen's soba compares to honmura an. ← fwiw, there seems to be only one soba dish on the menu.
  5. Nathan

    Matsugen

    significantly. details were sometime last week on Eater.
  6. Nathan

    Matsugen

    yeah, it opened last Thursday. prices seem high.
  7. Nathan

    Bar Q

    its interesting that he didn't like any of the dishes that I had.....except for the unagi fritters....which as far as I can tell, only contain unagi when Bruni or Platt are eating them. guess that's what happens when a critic is recognized.
  8. to comment on Dave H's point: I'll go back to Leonard Kim's reference to baseball (a subject which, unlike statistics and dining, I do know something about): you can pretty clearly see the difference between a career .250 and .300 hitter at the plate...in just one at bat. (with rare exceptions...Kirby Puckett and the like) the .300 hitter will be more disciplined, chase less, not try to pull everything, will hit better fouls (a foul straight back means they just missed nailing the pitch), and when they make outs...are more likely to make that out hitting a hard line drive at someone. the reason why hitting is one of the hardest things to do in all of professional sports is that you can do everything right and you'll still mostly get an out. but the difference in approach is obvious to the careful observer. scouts rely upon this a great deal. the thing is: merely making contact will get you enough grounders in the right places, bloops and the like to get to the Mendoza line (this is why National League pitchers generally manage to hit .200)....but the .300 hitter might hit the ball hard five times more in 20 at bats than the .250 hitter. (put differently, one look at Will Clark's swing during a slump and you would still know that he was an above .300 hitter) likewise, there's something to this for restaurants. I suppose the real test of service is what happens when a restaurant screws up. I think anonymity matters here.
  9. and what I'm saying is that one anonymous visit a restaurant, statistically, will very rarely screw over a deserving restaurant. the odds will still be in the restaurant's favor. just not quite as skewed as they are when all of the visits are non-anonymous.
  10. and as I noted above, a visit with poor service is vastly more significant than a visit with good service.
  11. see my edit. as for sample size, that's purely a function of confidence level and allowable sampling error. in this matter, neither needs to be strong for us to have meaningful results.
  12. except that the contention was that he's usually recognized at high end restaurants. so, you can't normally expect him to get away with more than one anonymous visit. in which case, his SUR at a given restaurant is 1%. edit: now, yes, it's reasonably likely that about once every two years he experiences an SU at a restaurant with an SUR of 1%. so? the benefit of the doubt should go to the consumer not the restaurant. so even if one restaurant every two years is wrongly downgraded based upon service, he'll have pegged multiple others considerably more accurately than if he dined completely non-anonymously.
  13. I'm no statistician but my limited knowledge of the subject says you're wrong about that. Happy to hear from someone who knows more. ← assume that a 3/4 star restaurant screws up 2% of the time. assume that a 1/2 star restaurant screws up 25% of the time. if I visit a restaurant once and they don't screw up...it doesn't tell me much. if I visit a restaurant five times and they don't screw up...the odds of it being a 3/4 star restaurant are relatively high. if I visit a restaurant once and they screw up....the odds of that restaurant being 1/2 are quite high. a 3/4 would have to quite unlucky to screw up on my sole visit. if I visit a restaurant seven times and they screw up once, the odds of that restaurant being either a 3/4 or a 1/2 are relatively even. (there are ways to crunch this exactly...maybe a stats person here will do it)
  14. your point is that it's effectively a random sample. right. the point is that if a restaurant really does have outstanding service....then the odds of them screwing up on Bruni's table on the rare night that they don't recognize him are very low. therefore, if a restaurant does screw up, the odds are quite high that that restaurant frequently screws up.
  15. now assume that Bruni is recognized three out of four times at any given three star restaurant. the odds of a rare service failure on the one visit that he's not recognized are even lower...unless that restaurant really does have a high rate of service failures. in which case it's not a restaurant with good service.
  16. So you must think option three is that reviewers should try to evaluate some sort of average consumer experience. But I think it's already been established that they can't. ← I want their best effort.
  17. nah. music and theater critics note performance deficiencies all the time in their reviews. performance deficiencies that can well be just "off nights". and they make these judgments off of one performance (visit)! it looks to me like the real issue is the very nature of reviewing.
  18. here's what I hear: 1. that fuzzy pic of Bruni that shows up on Eater once in a while doesn't really look like him now. 2. with that said, high-end restaurants do usually spot him. they don't necessarily spot him right away. they don't spot him every visit (or they miss him for most of the meal on some visits)...this goes for even four-star places. 3. a busy, large restaurant, unless they have someone at the door fulltime with the sole job of looking for him (and who happens to either actually know what he looks like and has guidance such as that given at Nobu to their staff on how to spot his dining companions)...could easily miss him on some of his visits. 4. look at it this way, if he visits Per Se four times and manages to dine anonymously for just one of them...he now has quite a bit more data to work with.
  19. of course everyone at a given performance with reasonably similar seating gets the same experience. not so for restaurants.
  20. You'll have to excuse me if I don't exactly take innuendo from Page Six and Gawker as accepted fact. ← they source.
  21. what I'm saying is that partial anonymity is better than complete non-anonymity. let alone a restaurant knowing ahead of time that a reviewer is coming.
  22. It's a question that can answered simply and definitively with data! All you have to do is find a restaurant where the general consensus of truly anonymous "reviewers" (e.g., bloggers, eG participants, etc.) is that the restaurant is clearly not as good as the critic's review would indicate. For example: Bruni said the steaks were mindblowing, everyone else thinks they're just okay. Bruni rated the restaurant excellent, everyone else thinks it's mediocre. These may be indications that Bruni is incompetent, but they may also be evidence that he was gamed by the restaurant. In the absence of such examples, it is reasonable to conclude that he's not been successfully gamed. ← 1. again, I wonder about Adour. I'm sure there are other examples. Mermaid Inn or Red Cat or somesuch. 2. many bloggers and foodboard participants aren't anonymous at various restaurants too. 3. many restaurant he reviews we don't have a wealth of data on.
  23. since none of is in a position to know all the circumstances of each review, obviously we can't answer slkinsey's question. that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. does 20% anonymity matter? absolutely. here's hoping that Bruni isn't spotted at least once at Bar Q so that, unlike Adam Platt, he doesn't get unagi in his unagi fritters. (yes, I am suggesting that Bar Q might be cheating non-VIPs)
  24. rumor on the street is: 1. Pork buns coming off the menu. 2. They're looking at renting the space behind (not sure if this is ssam bar or noodle bar) to sell ssams and buns to go.
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