Who owns zagat survey

To arrive at numerical ratings a perfect score in each category is 30 , a Utah firm hired by the Zagats adds up the scores in each category for each restaurant and divides by the number of people who rated it.

The result—2. In this case, the rating would be The Zagats don't accept photocopied questionnaires. It's said to be impossible to stuff the ballot box. The punishment for trying to manipulate the survey is exclusion from it, a restaurateur's worst nightmare. In New York, there's also a quality control team of about people.

If the public's opinion of a restaurant differs markedly from their own, the team members investigate. A team of food-savvy editors makes sure that the blurb about each restaurant captures its essence. Aside from the ratings and reviews, the Zagat Survey is almost obsessively cross-indexed. You can browse for restaurants by cuisine and by neighborhood. The Survey has come a long way from its unlikely beginnings. After graduating from Yale Law School together in , the Zagats intended to spend their lives as corporate lawyers in their native Manhattan.

Politically, they were liberals: During the Kennedy Administration, Tim worked on the senior staff of the Peace Corps. The idea for the Survey was first suggested in and when the Zagats were on assignment together in Paris. Nina was taking classes at Le Cordon Bleu …cole de Cuisine. In the evenings, they dined out. A decade later in New York, the couple belonged to a wine and gourmet food group. At a dinner one night the group discussed the need for some sort of guide to the city's restaurants.

The first Zagat Survey polled people and reviewed restaurants. But individual critics couldn't keep up with the city's many new restaurants, and many people suspected that critics usually got better meals and service than the average diner. Diners and restaurateurs welcomed the populist approach. No one had applied the polling model to restaurant criticism before. George Lang of Cafe des Artistes on Manhattan's Upper West Side credits the Zagats with breaking the monopoly of the food critic and providing a plebiscite where restaurants are rated by those who frequent them.

Marilyn Laurie, the Zagats' adviser, believes this accounts in part for the authority of the brand. For its first few years, however, the Zagat Survey was about as visible as samizdat literature in Moscow in the old Soviet Union. Only a handful of Manhattan's gourmands knew about it. Marketing was primitive. The Zagats' friends would go to book stores and act surprised when the clerks said they never heard of the Zagat Survey. Tim Zagat would arrive later with a station wagon full of the by-3 inch directories.

By , sales reached about 3, copies a month. A November cover story in New York magazine changed everything. It turned out that an elite group of New Yorkers was reviewing restaurants for the Zagats.

Forty others were identified by profession: the chairman of Arbitron; a former placekicker for the New York Giants; an architect; a museum trustee; the minority leader of the New York State Senate; and assorted lawyers, investment bankers, and business executives. Within a month, the Zagats had sold 70, copies of their Survey, almost double their previous month high. Nina left her estate law practice in to become co-publisher. Each gravitated toward the parts of the business they felt most comfortable with.

She's way out ahead of me on the Web site. Branding experts such as Kevin L. Keller of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business say it's difficult to turn a family name into a brand. But if the family does decide to use its name, it has to be willing to step forward and represent the brand.

A generic name, however, does not make a great brand. They dine out several times a week, attend food industry events, mingle with wine and food tasting groups, and hand out free copies of their books to visitors.

They also have a flair for publicity that reinforces their image as champions of the consumer and enhances the authority of their brand. When Brooklyn restaurant the Grocery got a near-perfect Zagat score of 28 in , the news appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Restaurants, naturally, also cared about their Zagat ratings. Along with a score of 9 for food, the people at Zagat published this offending review:. The judge dismissed the case because a restaurant review — even one assembled from multiple anonymous opinions — does not constitute libel.

When Zagat hit the internet, it put its survey results — the very things that powered it through decades of relevance — behind a paywall. Online, not as many people cared that Zagat was the original user-generated food review outlet, when new user-generated food review outlets, like Yelp, provided content for free. While under Google ownership, Zagat also changed its ratings system. For more than 35 years, the Zagat guides asked their survey participants to rate restaurants on a scale between one and three across four categories.

The scores were averaged and multiplied by 10 to produce the published rating of up to But in , Zagat switched to a system that scores restaurants on a scale of one to five stars. Zagat converted all of its ratings to the new star system, which was easy enough to comprehend. A restaurant previously rated 29 points for food and 28 points for decor would now have 4. In , Zagat published surveys in 70 different cities. And because this is the guidebook for , there will also be a website and an app.

Update: April 2, , p. It has been updated throughout to reflect the latest information. Chefs around the country are putting their spins on classic Thanksgiving dishes — and putting them in to-go boxes for you to feast on at home.

As new, cool food brands have popped up all over Instagram, so have brick-and-mortar stores dedicated to collecting them all in one place. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. A brand partnership deck for The Infatuation notes that its website receives 4 million monthly views and that its total social following includes 4.

The audience for Zagat is presumably older. In New York City, the curator group comprises 88, and is something Stang hopes to replicate in other cities over time, including internationally. Zagat is focused on developing more brand partnerships as well as seeing revenue from book sales, some of which is being driven by corporate orders. Stang said that shortly after announcing the New York City guide would be back out in print, he received inquiries about making custom orders where companies could customize the guide with their logo and gift them to clients or employees.

For now, only the New York City anniversary guide is being published, but based on its reception, the company may decide to publish more guides in the future. Stang said the team is also looking to generate revenue from the Zagat brand via events.

It's created 19 boxes, bringing in seven-figure revenue. This week's Media Briefing recaps the latest earnings reports from four media companies and reviews what they indicate about the current stages of traditional publishers remaking themselves into digital organizations.

Starting Jan.