"how to read a restaurant review" news and stories

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.