Archive for the ‘Dining Reviews’ Category
Foreseeing the Future of Restaurant Guides: An Interview with Alain Gayot
December 3, 2009
UBI UBI is excited to welcome another highly respected, well-established lifestyle reviewer to our flourishing database: GAYOT.com. The family-owned restaurant, hotel, shopping, and tourism guidebook series has been published in France and the U.S. for nearly five decades. As one of the first to adopt Internet distribution, they continue to shape the future of culinary guides by partnering with UBI UBI, itself an innovator in smartphone-accessed, portable dining reviews on the mobile Web.
You’ll find that GAYOT.com reviews are clear, detailed, witty, and invaluable. Quickly absorbed one-sentence summaries provide an overview of each spot, while the toque (chef’s hat) rating system provides an instant snapshot of the restaurant’s quality. In the helpful Quick Bites section, you’ll find only in-and-out, to-go venues. We think GAYOT.com provides another smart, honest perspective to help you use your hard-earned money wisely while getting the dining-out experience that best satisfies your cravings. The addition of Gayot reviews also means more expert opinions, more restaurant coverage, more updates, and smarter dining decisions for the Ubi Ubi community.
Alain Gayot, the Editor-In-Chief at GAYOT.com, recently stopped by the UBI UBI office, and we seized the opportunity to learn more about his restaurant guide philosophy and his opinions on current restaurant trends. Below is a sampling of questions from our interview, in which we discussed what kind of traveler GAYOT.com appeals to, how the company made the transition from print to Web, and what justifies a negative restaurant review.
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On Language:
Time to Upgrade The User-generated Review
November 5, 2009
Whenever you open up an online forum to the masses and allow for democratic expression of opinions, you’re bound to incur an excessive amount of poorly conceived pieces of writing.
Alas, it seems most members of the general public don’t have a strong desire or need to improve their modes of expression on the Internet, which is why the new movement towards concision is a welcome trend in online interactions. The advantage of Twitter is that in any given instance, only 140 characters need be sacrificed in the name of weak language – damage contained; language crisis averted. And history has proven that the best writers, poets, and speakers can do wonders with 140 characters.
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Posted in Dining Reviews, Language, Restaurants, Social Media | No Comments »
Paving the Way to Guilt-Free Dining: An Interview with Clean Plates Author Jared Koch
November 4, 2009
New York City can a tough place in many ways, but not in terms of finding healthy food.
In an attempt to prove that delicious taste and varied flavors can be synonymous with good nutrition, Clean Plates puts reviews of Manhattan’s best healthy dining options, plus advice on improving your diet, all in one handy guide. With a nutritionist perspective and a democratic acceptance of diverse preferences and philosophies – yes, the guide does save room for meat, as long as it’s sustainably raised – the 125 restaurants in the compilation have all tastes covered.
Jared Koch, the nutritionist mastermind behind the guide, is a proponent of bioindividuality: a food-forward approach to healthy eating that disperses the single-mindedness of one-size-fits-all diets. Now, like technology, eating is all about customization, and we find that perfectly tech chic. To find out more about New York’s healthy dining scene, we invited Jared to sit down for an interview. Read below to learn his take on personalized diets, how vegan isn’t always healthy, and the healthiest way to incorporate indulgences into your eating choices.
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Posted in Culinary Trends, Dining Reviews, Eating Trends, Health, Ingredients, New York, Restaurants | No Comments »
Michelin Anoints Bay Area’s 2010 Culinary Elite
October 19, 2009
The MICHELIN Guide released its much-anticipated list of San Francisco Bay Area & Wine Country stars today, just before tomorrow’s release of the 2010 Red Guide. As was the case for New York, this year’s guide includes several newly starred restaurants.
UBI UBI congratulates all the owners, chefs, and staff members for these honors, and welcomes Aziza, Commis, étoile, La Toque, Luce, Santé, Solbar, and Ubuntu to the list of star recipients. Cheers, to all of you! Read More »
Posted in Awards, Design-inspired, Dining Reviews, Impress, San Francisco Bay Area, Wine | No Comments »
Pity the Chef: Is It Ever Too Soon To Review a Restaurant?
October 12, 2009
It’s easy to sympathize with a chef on opening night in a high profile restaurant. Managing the chaos of a professional kitchen is hard enough on an ordinary night in which speedy delivery and careful preparation perpetually strive for highest priority. On opening night, take those same challenges and turn the burner up to full blast. Each grain of salt too much, each drop of sauce misplaced, each degree Fahrenheit too high or too low gets noticed and potentially documented by a critic. It’s cook or be cooked.
Reviewing a restaurant on opening night is, by all appearances, cruel and unusual punishment. Doesn’t the staff have enough on its plate without the added scrutiny? Read More »
Posted in Dining Culture, Dining Reviews | No Comments »
Michelin Awards NYC Restaurants Its 2010 Stars!
October 5, 2009
The release of the 2010 MICHELIN Guides is upon us and word has already spread about the newly awarded - and highly coveted - MICHELIN Guide stars within the New York restaurant scene. Without further ado, read below for the list of restaurants that made it into this year’s guide.
UBI UBI would like to extend congratulations to all the owners, chefs, and staff members who earned these special honors, plus give a warm welcome to all newcomers on the list. Kudos! Read More »
Posted in Awards, Dining Reviews, Impress, New York, Restaurants, Wine | No Comments »
As the Mobile World Turns
October 1, 2009
The US mobile phone industry is far from perfect. In a system where consumers are left to find their way through a bafflingly complicated and illogical system of service contracts and stripped down versions of the Web, sometimes it’s easier to view mobile technology in light of its limitations rather than its advancements.
That was until the iPhone came along.
It was sleek, ingeniously designed, and had more sex appeal than any phone that had come before it – not to mention all the frills of a near-complete mobile Web experience. It had network operators trembling with desire like cell phones set to vibrate. But the iPhone showed up at the ball with its hand on the arm of a rich hot shot: AT&T. Passions flared and desire brewed. AT&T had something that everyone wanted. Read More »
Posted in Dining Reviews, Mobility, Trends | No Comments »
A Look Back at JoeDoe vs. The Blogosphere
July 24, 2009
When Marc Shepherd posted a middling-to-poor review of JoeDoe two weeks ago on his restaurant-review blog, New York Journal, who could have predicted the “oh, snap”-worthy exchange of insults he’d initiated? (Well, maybe we could have, considering head chef Joe Dobias’s history of confrontation with online reviewers.) Soon after Shepherd summed up Dobias’s new East Village establishment as “disappointing,” Dobias responded with a wordy rebuttal in the blog’s comments section. Dobias argued that Shepherd was basing his “malicious” post on emotion rather than fact (since the blogger was forbidden to take photos during his meal). Strong words were used, typos were made, and egos were battered. Both Shepherd and Dobias left an unseemly number of responses (read them in all their juiciness here), and news of the showdown made it to food blogs everywhere, culminating in an interview between Dobias and New York Magazine’s Grub Street.
Now that a few weeks have passed and the dust has settled, we here at UBI UBI think it’s a good time to consider the ramifications of this incident. Frankly, we love the idea of a chef harnessing the almighty power of the blog — we support and facilitate informed dialogues between those who make good food and those who appreciate it. Yet the crux of Dobias’s argument (which admittedly isn’t delivered in the most elegant of terms) is that everyday diners’ dialogue and opinions are uninformed.
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Posted in Dining Reviews, Restaurants | 2 Comments »
How Do Dining Professionals Decide Where to Eat?
June 8, 2009
While talking with the eclectic personalities at the 2009 James Beard Foundation Awards, we pressed for information (given our pointed interest in the field) about what restaurateurs and culinary personalities think about restaurant reviews. How do they feel when they’re reviewed? Where or from whom do they get recommendations when they’re in a new city? And which is better: user-generated opinions, or professionally written reviews?
Answer: neither. It turns out that chefs tend to get their recommendations from fellow chefs. But what if you’re not already an insider? The general consensus: professionally written reviews.
Ted Allen, a presenter that night and host of Chopped and Food Detectives on the Food Network, as well as a guest judge on Iron Chef America, had plenty to say about restaurant recommendations. First he pulled out his iPhone, admitting, “I’m a cult member.” He pointed out, “New York is a city where people make a lot of decisions about restaurants, but we come to trust specific restaurant critics and food writers. I don’t want a popularity contest. I’m looking for experience, a trained palate, and good judgment. The world is an ever-metastasizing collection of other people’s opinions, whether they have credibility or not. We need vision, insight, and trusted voices.”
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The Touch-Screen Tablecloth: Ultra-attentive Service or Another Impersonal Interface?
April 22, 2009
Vacuums, centrifuges, and other high-tech kitchen equipment may be de rigueur these days, but few restaurants have gone so far as to replace the waiters with computers. At least one restaurant has made that leap: Inamo, an Asian fusion venture in London’s very chic Soho neighborhood. Each table is a touch-sensitive pad filled with images from an overhead projector, and every seat at the table is fully interactive: Orders are placed by manipulating menus projected on the table.
While you’re waiting for your food, you can change your virtual tablecloth, play video games on the tabletop, see movie and theater schedules, view your running tab, arrange a taxi, or view the chefs at work via kitchen webcams. The food itself is served by real human staff, who can also help you with the technology if you’re having trouble. Inamo’s owners, Danny Potter and Noel Hunwick, say they were trying to overcome the frustrations they found in less tech-savvy restaurants: waiters ignoring you, pushing you to order more, shoving the bill at you, or pressuring you into leaving before you’re ready. At Inamo, you control all those factors yourself. And if you’re bored, you can always order more food or play more games—not that there’s much of a difference here.
Posted in Dining Reviews, Restaurants, Wine | No Comments »
