Restaurants ‘Nudge Diners’ in Campaign for Zagat Votes

The Zagat guides took another punch this week. The New York Post’s Steve Cuozzo revealed that restaurant owners in New York are mounting e-mail campaigns to have diners vote for their restaurants, a practice allegedly forbidden by the Zagats. Yet, according to the Post, the Zagats don’t seem to be enforcing their rules.

Cuozzo writes:

There’s no telling how many of the Survey’s 31,604 balloteers last year were put up to it by their favorite eateries. Tim and Nina Zagat claim to have “filters” in place to weed out ballot-box stuffers, but can’t disclose their methods without alerting the violators.

So we’re asked to believe that everyone who’s urged to write up a restaurant by the restaurant itself is as likely to hate it as to love it—a premise on which I’d vote a resounding no.

The Post story comes on the heels of a February piece in Smart Money magazine, which “crunched the numbers and discovered the latest dining trend at Zagat: grade inflation.”

Back in 2003, we noted the late Pulitzer Prize-winning critic David Shaw unleashed his own spirited attack on the Zagat dining guide for Los Angeles. “I love Woody Allen’s movies, Billy Crystal’s Oscar monologues and Darrell Hammond’s impressions on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Shaw wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “But nothing makes me laugh as much as the Zagat dining guide for Los Angeles.”

(Via Gridskipper)

Related on World Hum:
* Bryan Curtis: ‘My Dinner With Zagat’
* Jon Stewart on the Zagat Prison Guide

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