Zagat dissing Vancouver?

[jbonne]

while planning a trip up to YVR a few weeks from now, scouting around for new restaurant ideas, i headed over to the Zagat.com site. while i've used, and appreciated, the Zagat reviews for Vancouver in the past, i suddenly discovered they had completely disappeared from the site.

this seemed odd, since i know they'd been there before and they were still selling the hard copy of the '01-'02 version.

so i e-mailed them. here's their response:

Thank you for contacting Zagat Survey.

Periodically we update our online content to include reviews consistent with our current Zagat Survey publications.

With our most recent update we removed the Vancouver, Toronto content from our website as we have not surveyed this area in more than one year and the content is no longer considered reliable

As we expand to produce restaurant guides in more markets worldwide, we are focusing our efforts on covering the major metropolitan areas that have vibrant and evolving restaurant scenes. This sometimes means eliminating certain locations. {emphasis mine} We make our decision, in part, based on many factors including feedback from our customers

I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. The best way to voice your opinion is to cast your vote in our surveys. Please visit our site at www.zagat.com <http://www.zagat.com> for more information.

Zagat Survey is committed to making our restaurant guides, as well as all of our surveys, as comprehensive, fun-to-read and up-to-date as possible.  We hope you continue to enjoy Zagat Surveys for the city nearest you, as well as for all your travel needs. 

Thank you for your understanding and support. 

Sincerely,

Elesha

Zagat Survey Customer Service

Feedback@zagat.com

surely, they weren't saying that Vancouver was not one of those cities "that have vibrant and evolving restaurant scenes"?? if that's the case, i'd expect my adopted hometown of Seattle to vanish before Vancouver, to say nothing of St. Louis, Utah or Detroit.

so what's afoot here? i suspect they're not making as much money as they'd hoped off the Canadian market, though Toronto still remains. even so, it strikes me as bizarre they would turn their back on as foodie a town as Vancouver.

anyone else find this a tad bizarre?

Edited July 19, 2004 by jbonne (log)

[barolo]

I assume, like you, that the market didn't work for them here. I wouldn't read anything more than that into it. I'm sure they'd cover any city and find something "vibrant" about the restaurant scene, if it was a money maker.

[jamiemaw]

True story, Barolo.

jbonne,

Post the perfect storm of tourism/hospitality meltdown following 9/11, publishing quickly followed suit. Concurrently, many print publications were also investing heavily in their e-platforms. I am speculating here, but would surmise that Zagat was not immune--something had to go, and that was Vancouver and Portland (and perhaps others), two smaller markets, albeit ones culinarily punching well above their weight.

No matter your thoughts about Zagat (certainly many know the brand and like the convenient format), the local edition was a credit to Tim Pawsey, a fair-minded and very experienced food and wine writer who compiled and edited the Vancouver/BC editions (three, I believe) since their inception. Perhaps they'll be back when things settle down, or in anticipation of the Olympics.

In the interim, out-of-town visitors can access The British Columbia Eating + Drinking Guide--the 2004 edition is sold out, however 2005 edition will be out shortly. Secondly, eGulleteers are welcome to access the "Where the Bites Are" summer edition of Vancouver Magazine, as well as the annual Restaurant Awards results, compiled from 30 food media and industry experts, here Vancouver Magazine. Both are dependable resources and comprise restaurants that we would cheerfully recommend to friends and vistors.

The $10 you save should be immediatly invested in some pints of the excellent new Okanagan Springs Helles, which I had the good fortune to sample on Saturday evening, alongside some excellent rose (L'Hortus de Bergerie) from Marquis Wine Cellars.

Hope this assists,

Jamie

[Daddy-A]

Perhaps they'll be back when things settle down, or in anticipation of the Olympics.

Oh, they'll be back. Sooner or later, they ALL come back.

[jbonne]

Post the perfect storm of tourism/hospitality meltdown following 9/11, publishing quickly followed suit. Concurrently, many print publications were also investing heavily in their e-platforms. I am speculating here, but would surmise that Zagat was not immune--something had to go, and that was Vancouver and Portland (and perhaps others), two smaller markets, albeit ones culinarily punching well above their weight.

certainly understand that they halted their print editions (though Portland is odd, since it used to be joined with the Seattle book and was then separated), but i'm more puzzled about the online presence.

they're still selling the hard copy of the '01-'02 Vancouver book, but they've pulled the online ratings. so does this mean they're willing to sell people outdated reviews in print, but not online?

btw, the Portland listings are still online, though i dunno how outdated those are. so they're not being quite consistent with de-listing discontinued markets.

generally, i keep seeing an ever more troubling pattern of behavior by Zagat. they seem to have overextended themselves during the publishing boom you described and now they're getting more and more stingy. at least they've cut back on the pop-ups that were pervading their site.

i've essentially gone completely online with them and stopped buying their hard-copy guides, though i still get a free copy of Seattle for my contributions. so i wouldn't save the $10 by not buying a hard copy of the (now outdated) YVR book. it never made sense to me to buy a guide for two nights of dining.

--

incidentally, we checked your magazine's food edition and found it quite helpful. and we'll just have to keep an eye out for the Okanagan Springs Helles while we're up there in a few weeks.

[vandan]

while seattle is a nice enough place with some good food to be had , its just not even in the same league as van , but i guess thats just the way in the world of corporate america, its all about hyping the biggest money-maker, not necessarily the most relevant players

[jbonne]

while seattle is a nice enough place with some good food to be had , its just not even in the same league as van ,

well, i go back and forth on this -- having thought at various times that either city was trumping the other in food offerings. being in SEA, i get a lot more exposure to our food than to YVR, but that's not necessarily an advantage.

however, i find it reprehensible that Zagat would abandon either city. both are doing more than their fair share to uphold North American culinary standards, certainly more so than many Zagat cities.

[jamiemaw]

while seattle is a nice enough place with some good food to be had, its just not even in the same leaugue as van.

It would be a bad idea to digress too far to discuss which is the better dining city—Vancouver or Seattle (or Portland, for that matter)—even if culinary chauvinism has become almost as strong a growth industry as the food service business itself.

Perhaps it’s more interesting to look more closely at the cities’ culinary divergence, especially given that we share a common climate, common produce and ingredients, access to local wines of increasing quality, and emerging scrums of talented, well-trained local chefs. And yet in some Seattle-area restaurants you know straightaway that you are eating there and not in Vancouver, and vice versa.

I have many fine memories of dining in Seattle, from the poverty of university days when we used to hang at Jake O’Shaughnessy’s, Henry’s off Broadway, or some of the bars in Pioneer Square. Seattle had a much more elevated bar culture (see below) and we liked the rollick and roll. Later, fine dining and places like Wild Ginger captured our imagination. And of course, when Kerry Sear jumped from Vancouver's Four Seasons to the Georgian Room at the (then) Four Seasons Olympic, we all piled down to see what was going on. Maybe it was just being out of town, but we always found Seattle a vibrant city in which to eat, drink and, hopefully, sleep with Mary.

I think there are several, largely economic items that describe the difference in culinary style. First, Seattle did not suffer the draconian liquor legislation that emasculated Vancouver’s independent dining scene between World War I and the early 60s, that allowed hotel restaurants and private clubs to flourish and independent restaurants to wither away. After WW II, there were only diners and coffee shops in Vancouver, or lavish fine dining rooms in the downtown hotels. Ironically, it was the teetotal WAC Bennett who reversed the legislation, but it took a while for independent restaurateurs like Erwin Dobelli (The William Tell in its original Richards Street location) and Hy Aisenstat (everywhere else) to gain traction in the market. Seattle, as far as I can tell, never missed a step.

I wouldn’t pretend to have a detailed knowledge of the ethnography of Seattle, but clearly Vancouver’s culinary diversity has benefited its restaurants. The wave of Indian immigrants (and Ugandan-Indian refugees) to South Vancouver in the 60s and 70s spurred a large number of Indian restaurants; several of their more evolved offspring are now amongst the best on the continent. So too the wave of Chinese immigration, especially between Expo 86 and the turnover of Hong Kong in 1997, much of it fuelled by the Business Immigration Program. Suddenly, Chinese dining in Vancouver took off, with many top chefs moving here. Although that has relaxed, Vancouver and Richmond remain peppered with excellent Chinese rooms. Smaller waves of Japanese, Vietnamese and Cambodian immigration also occurred; today there are more than 250 Japanese restaurants in the Vancouver Yellow Pages and the children of many of those restaurateurs are starting ramen and izakaya joints. More recently, the exodus of professionals from Seoul has sponsored a lot new Korean restaurants, many of which are located (not so curiously) near better schools.

During the 90s, it’s my (perhaps mistaken) impression that Seattle was riding the tsunami of the tech boom, and that immigration was largely coming from elsewhere in the US and less so from offshore. I remember the chat at downtown hotel bars during the 90s—everybody there was there to see Microsoft or a Microsoft supplier. Of course when the tech-wreck inevitably occurred, the restaurant scene seemed to implode too. Restaurants that were a tough ticket when they first opened (Belltown’s Fandango and Jeremiah Tower’s Stars leap to mind), were easy walk-ins just a year later.

Vancouver has also benefited from a low dollar, attracting the film business, tourism (especially the cruise industry), and ‘early retirees’. Each has benefitted the restaurant industry. Seattle at the time was concentrating on public works--its museum, music and professional sports facilities are light years ahead of Vancouver's.

In my parents’ generation, a conscious effort was made in Vancouver to limit urban sprawl and freeway-dependant transportation systems. Now, downtown core areas that combine residential and commercial uses (most obvious in the West End, False Creek, The Granville Slopes and South Granville and more recently, Yaletown and Coal Harbour), have also fuelled concentrated pods of restaurants along arterials and side streets. The recent mixed-use development style of downtown condo towers have also seen new restaurant start-ups in podium spaces, even if developers are reluctant to accept the covenant of new operators. The spaces, designed largely for retail use, typically reflect that. But concentration of population increases restaurant opportunity and eventually competition—and quality. Eating out becomes an every night occurrence, and not limited to celebratory or destination dining—a car need not be involved. Seattle seems to lag in that planning model, at least if its crowded freeways are any indication. It’s just a shame that Vancouver has lost a lot of its population of character and heritage buildings.

One final point: service. In American restaurants there’s a different style, also partially driven by economics. In an American fine dining room, there may be as many as six or seven service staff approaching your table; the division of labour is more fractured. In Canadian fine dining restaurants, the style is to have about half that many. Not all of this difference can be accounted for by the substantially higher minimum wage in Canada; it’s just the way it is.

Several years ago we thought it would be both amusing and interesting to co-author an article with a Seatlle food writer. The mission would be to compare and contrast six different categories of dining in the two cities--PNW, Italian, French, Japanese, CFD-concept, and Chinese. Then we'd see who came out on top. It never pulled off, but perhaps its time to re-examine the idea.

In closing, allow me to ask why, if there are so darn many great restaurants in Seattle, why is it so darn hard to find a decent cup of coffee? I'm just kidding of course, but I would put Vancouver's Cafe Artigiano at the head of the line any day of the week.

[jbonne]

I wouldn’t pretend to have a detailed knowledge of the ethnography of Seattle, but clearly Vancouver’s culinary diversity has benefited its restaurants.

quite agree, and this is one of the reasons i think YVR's selections end up a bit better rounded. not that SEA hasn't had a similar influx, and there are great true ethnic restaurants here, but there's also a tendency for legit ethnic cuisine to be transformed for the worse -- dumbed-down, that is -- for the bland American palate. in fact, i'd cite Wild Ginger as one of the worst offenders. not that their food isn't tasty -- but i can get it better seasoned, more authentically prepared and for about a third of the price simply by driving down to the International District.

But concentration of population increases restaurant opportunity and eventually competition—and quality. Eating out becomes an every night occurrence, and not limited to celebratory or destination dining—a car need not be involved.

the only upside to this is that those of us willing to brave downtown on a weeknight, preferably after 830p, can have our pick of just about any walk-in we like. personally, i'm happy to chase out the suburbanites, though it's probably less useful for many establishments' business models.

In an American fine dining room, there may be as many as six or seven service staff approaching your table; the division of labour is more fractured. In Canadian fine dining restaurants, the style is to have about half that many.

and don't forget the default expectation in U.S. restaurants of a 20 percent tip. not that i don't like tipping well -- not only for good service but also to staff whom i've come to know over repeated visits to my favorite places -- but the U.S. restaurant culture is such that servers become indignant when mediocre service isn't rewarded with 18-20 percent. and of course, having seven people hovering tends to make service thoroughly intrusive. this is why i prefer dining in Europe.

In closing, allow me to ask why, if there are so darn many great restaurants in Seattle, why is it so darn hard to find a decent cup of coffee? I'm just kidding of course, but I would put Vancouver's Cafe Artigiano at the head of the line any day of the week.

it's as simple as dropping by Vivace, though i'll admit Artigiano is pretty darn good. i've never wanted for a decent cup here, or rather a decent shot, but i'm continually astounded at the abysmal quality of restaurant coffee in SEA.

it might be tolerable elsewhere in the world, but in a city known for its espresso, it's NOT ACCEPTABLE for a restaurant to have second-rate espresso service -- or, as i'm increasingly finding, none at all. and while you might escape from this clause by virtue of not being an Italian restaurant, the pitiful quality of espresso at Italian establishments here is just inexcusable. i've begun to use that as a benchmark for whether the management has their act together.

one notable exception, btw, is Le Pichet, which in true French bistro form, offers excellent espresso (from Cafe Vita) any time of day. they are, sadly, a rarity.