Free Best Food Writing 2010 by Holly Hughes

any kitchen bribe). In the past, he’s placed little promotional tents on the tables or slipped cards into the checks, asking diners to vote in the next Zagat survey. His goal is to land a Top 5 ranking in Zagat’s food category. He doesn’t apologize for it, either. “That’s what grass-roots PR is all about,” Buben says. He leaves it up to the Zagat data-crunchers to weed out the questionable ballots, which they claim they can do.
    Makoto has accomplished exactly what Buben was aiming for. The restaurant opened either in 1992 or 1993 (neither Makoto manager Michiko Lecuyer nor anyone at the restaurant could remember), and for its first few years, it never even appeared in the Zagat guide. But then in 1997, it suddenly scored 28 out of 30 points for food, tying it for second place with L’Auberge Chez Francois in the entire D.C. market. Makoto has never slipped lower than third place since then, a run of more than 12 years.
    Lecuyer credits the kitchen for Makoto’s long ride atop the charts. The chefs select only the freshest seasonal ingredients, from fish to vegetables, no matter what the price, she says. The cooks also prepare the omakase plates with a nod to authenticity. “We serve the food we want to eat,” Lecuyer says, “the way we want to eat it.... Our customers get it and understand it. That’s why we’ve been highly listed.”
    Now, if there’s one question you don’t want to ask the owner or manager of an elegant Japanese restaurant like Makoto, it’s this: Do you beg or cheat for Zagat votes?
    “We don’t do that,” Lecuyer says, noting that servers aren’t allowed to talk to customers. “We don’t know who is doing the survey and is not doing the survey. We don’t know.”
     
    SUCH IGNORANCE MAY BE a blessing to Makoto, but it’s a bane for diners who want to know how legitimate Zagat’s ratings are. Team Zagat in New York won’t answer any questions about its survey methodology, and Tim and Nina Zagat turned down my interview request. It’s more of the same stonewalling that has worked for 30 years for the Zagats and their guides, which now cover subjects ranging from dining to golf in more than 100 countries. The company’s attitude forces you to make a snap decision: You either trust it or you lump it.
    A lot of people are opting for the latter. According to a New York Post article from earlier this month, not only are Zagat sales “down dramatically,” but the company moved too slowly online, “allowing Yelp and others to dominate the market.” Zagat, the paper wrote, laid off about 16 people in May. The founders themselves seemed to see the writing on the wall a year earlier: The Zagats tried to sell their company for a reported $200 million last year but couldn’t find any buyers in that price range and pulled Zagat off the auction block.
    It’s easy to see why people choose Yelp, Chowhound, Urban Spoon, and OpenTable over Zagat, both the guide and the online site. The obsolete-before-you-buy-it Zagat book is $14.95 a shot, and Zagat.com charges nearly $25 a year to access its complete site, including those ratings that can be seriously outdated. Plus, the mere act of creating an account with Zagat.com requires that you provide the kind of personal information—mailing address, telephone, birth year—that other sites have decided to forgo.
    By contrast, Yelp, Chowhound, Urban Spoon, and other sites are free, and most already have established communities where members interact with each other on particular topics and restaurants. Even better for diners looking for recommendations on Yelp or OpenTable, they can see exactly how many people have commented on a particular restaurant—and how those reviews have been averaged into an overall rating. Even the minimal transparency on these sites makes Zagat seem like Stalinist Russia.
    “Zagat is not a primary source [for information] anymore,” says Dean Gold, the chef and owner of Dino in Cleveland Park, which scores a