Customer Reviews

Zagatsurvey 2004 San Francisco Bay Area Restaurants (Zagatsurvey: San Francisco/ Bay Area Restaurants)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I agree very much with the other review here. For some other cities, Zagat is on target. They are sadly way off target for SF. No way are they there yet. Top rated restaurants are sadly off the mark...and for areas such as Fisherman's Wharf, the ONLY restaurants included are the way over priced ones. For most neighborhoods, actually, it's only the high priced trendy places that are reviewed. Someone from the Zagat office needs to actuallY COME HERE to SF, and see what the truth is!

I religiously buy the San Francisco guide of Zagats as I found it to be the best resource. However, the 2004 issue is very disappointing. I don't agree that 24 of the top 40 restaurants ALL being given the same score. Also, one of the restaurants that was named in the top 40 for food was in actuality doing very poorly, brought in a new chef, a new menu, and new decor. There was no mention in the review of this.
With Zagat expanding into other areas like movie reviews et al, it is obvious that the quality control of the restaurant guides is suffering. If you purchase this book I would ignore the reviews and use it for more of a convenient restaurant phone book.

I completely agree with two reviewers and I also know the reason why Zagat is useless as far as the restaurant reviews go.They just take summarizing phrases/words out of reviewers comments and then without any context put it in form of text for us to read. How do I know this? I was one of their reviewers. Even when I tried giving detailed reviews, they just picked up some of my comments randomly and used them in the reviews.

Here is another problem with their reviewing process: Zagat just adds-up averages from a bunch of reviewers without first checking the quality of each review-so if some dedicated reviewer thoroughly checks up a restaurant by going there a dozen of times and decides to give that restaurant just 1 star but another reviewer just goes to the same place once and gives it a five star (even if it is the restaurant owner)-the average is set to 3 stars. Then one more person does the same thing and the average gets bumped-up so it is a good idea to use the guide as a phone book and if you want good surveys try other sources such as news papers, web-sites etc.

This was our first visit to San Francisco, so I bought this guide based on my nice experiences with Zagat NYC Restaurants. With all due respect to the previous reviewers, my family found this Zagats Survey quite helpful.

We are a difficult family to please. My wife wants value, I am a vegetarian, and our kids are, well, not adventurous eaters. None of us like touristaurants. We much prefer unique, down to earth kinds of places.

This guide was just what we needed. We avoided a couple of well publicized places that were judged mediocre but found a few out of the way gems. In one wonderful, tiny restaurant the chef asked how we found them, as usually they only had locals. None of our meals disappointed us when we used Zagats/SF as our guide. In fact, one of the nicest parts of our West Coast vacation was all the great dining in San Francisco.

To be fair to the other reviewers, we are not typical. Fancy and formal and expensive are turn-offs for us. We are looking for personality, family and vegetarian friendly, and value, as well as good food and service. Gary Danko or French Laundry? Not us. But for our out of town family looking for an honest guide, this was perfect.