what makes a place good
thoughts on evaluating restaurants, bars, and cafes
I am currently participating in Inkhaven, and decided to write this post because I wanted something easy. I am on the first day of my period, had a busy day, and am starting my daily post extremely late while also in pain, a little tipsy, tired, and hungry. However, through writing and thinking about what I like in places, I immediately notice that I’m using a very similar algorithm to decide which people I particularly like. And I think there’s more to say about this, but not tonight. Tonight we are tired and will be discussing how I assess restaurants, bars, and cafes. I am not going to edit this piece. These are all my raw and unfiltered words. Sorry.
I get a pretty large amount of joy from going out for food, drinks, and treats. And through the years, I’ve accumulated a whole lot of opinions.
Upon reflecting on what I like in places, I found that there are 5 key dimensions I’m judging on.
Perhaps this essay will prompt you into thinking about the places you like and why you like them. If so:
You can treat these dimensions as a rubric, with each one getting a score between 1-5. Afterwards, tally the scores up. The number should be between 5-25. My guess is: anything between 5-11 is either actively quite bad or very mediocre, 12-17 is somewhat mediocre and largely unmemorable, 18-21 is quite good, and anything between 22-25 is excellent.
I found it quite entertaining to go through all of my favorite places one by one and give them each a score.
I also enjoy that this rubric allows for individualization. Also, when making recommendations to other people, you can apply the rubric to them and will likely get a different score than you did for yourself.
Here it is:
Quality.
This one is pretty obvious, and I think is the main variable professional restaurant critics are tracking. I think it usually comes down to how much care is going into the establishment. Questions like: how good is the food? How good is the service? How well put together are the aesthetics?
However, if you make a habit of looking at recommendations and reviews by professional restaurant critics, you’ll probably quickly find that google search + reviews by the general public are more valuable for finding good places for your specific situation pretty much always.
Sincerity.
This is perhaps what some people mean when they say that a place feels “authentic”. If so, I think sincere is just a much better word than authentic. Regardless, what I mean, is that the place is true to what it is. If it is a cheap Chinese takeaway place where none of the employees speak English, it isn’t trying to be anything else. There probably isn’t a Banksy print on the wall. They don’t have environmentalist propaganda on their windows. You get the idea.
I went to a bar in Brussels that I think was a pretty great example of an insincere place. It was very clear that the bar wanted to project an image of caring about music. However, they were using vinyl records as decor for their walls, and they only had about a set of ~20 which were repeated several times everywhere across the place. In contrast, there is a bar in Oakland (Bar Shiru) that clearly genuinely really cares about music. They have an extensive and non-repetitive record collection, an extremely high quality record player, and (perhaps most importantly) are not just playing the top 100 songs on Spotify through the speakers.
Uniqueness and “me”-ness.
This serves as an enhancement to sincerity. For example, a hot dog place generally should abide by similar rules to a cheap Chinese takeaway place. However, in the case that the owners are diehard Libertarians, covering the walls and windows with Libertarian propaganda is not only ok but makes the whole place much, much better. There is a place in Berkeley called Top Dog that is exactly this. I am vegan and don’t particularly care for veggie dogs usually, but I would still probably recommend people go. I think about it several orders of magnitude more often than I think about any other hot dog place, and I would be pretty sad if it closed down. Uniqueness brings life and makes places feel much more like complex living organisms rather than just places that serve a function.
It is even better if something about the place feels like it touches a part of my personal identity. A pretty simple example would be: I really like cats. If the owners of a restaurant also really liked cats, they might be inclined to fill their walls with polaroid pictures of employees’ and customers’ cats on the walls. This would make me, personally, want to be at that restaurant more often.
Straightforwardness.
It feels like places are kind of trying to scam people in a similar way to budget airlines. For example, there are some places that will sell you a burger for $7, which is a pretty reasonable price for a burger (especially in Northern California). However, they will then price fries also at $7. While perhaps you would’ve been quite happy to have paid $14 for a burger and fries, you now are left with the sick feeling in your stomach of having been bamboozled.
This is especially true if they heavily advertised the price of the burger and obscured the price of the fries. Perhaps you can feel clever by going and only getting the burger, but you would have probably never felt tempted to do this without the feeling of them scamming you and now their scheme is depriving you of fries.
Although this was a more extreme example, a bunch of places do more subtle versions of this!
Distance/convenience.
A place feels far more magical to me if it has a bunch of other good qualities and is also close by and easy to get to. Sometimes it’s fun to go on a bit of a journey to get somewhere, but it honestly always feels pretty risky to do if I’m not relatively confident that it’ll be good. It is a very different experience to try a new restaurant across the street and have mediocre food than it is to drive an hour and struggle with parking to get to a new restaurant that then has mediocre food. Similarly, even if a place is amazing, if it is far out of the way, it is unlikely that I’ll fall in love with it in the same way I would if it were within walking distance.
Final Thoughts
I personally really care about noise levels. However, I’ve found that while some places are reliably quiet, the noise levels at any given restaurant at any given time are nearly completely stochastic. There are places that are very reliably loud, but those usually end up scoring really poorly on a bunch of other metrics.
I probably will just actually create a rubric for all of this and post it alongside a few of my favorite places and how they score on it. I think that post will be better than this one. Consider this one to have just been me laying out the foundations.