Sometimes restaurant reviews seem to skew towards the negative - so why bother reading them when you can get the gist from the headline? The Seattle Post Intelligencer critic stepped up to try and answer that very question this week. The headlines are only a glimpse of what the review was about and a half dozen words, except in very rare cases, is hardly capable of conveying the full experience that a review offers. Another potentially misleading element of a review is the number of stars or the numerical rating it received. A subjectively determined numerical value will give you even less information than the headline alone because you can't get a sense of the criteria used to justify the rating.

Newspapers tend to review new restaurants, which are more likely to be hit-or-miss on any given day during their infancy than a meal at a long lasting neighborhood favorite. Their kitchen might not be fully synched or perhaps they haven't settled on a menu of their best dishes. Time can change a restaurant for better or worse, and an early review may not tell the whole story.

A critic may look for different characteristics in their meal than the average person. For example, a reviewer might not have enjoyed a slightly noisy atmosphere from the presence of a large number of children, though a child-friendly restaurant may be the perfect dinner choice for your family. A headline that gloomily suggests a bistro did not live up to its full potential because it lacked a perfect roasted chicken might, in the course of the review, be revealed to offer up superb vegetarian options. Read the whole reviews and look at the points that are important to you, not just take the critic's word - or 5/10 rating - as law.