On Restaurant Reviews

There is a prolific amount of restaurant review websites among which the most popular are Metromix, Yelp and Zagat. But do they actually help the consumer?

So I decided to check their relevancy as I was looking for a restaurant to take my parents out. I wanted to enjoy some fish and seafood, therefore I needed a good selection, but my parents were undecided which meant that the menu needed also to offer other selections.

Just to pick on one website only, I visited Metromix.com. With a "fish and seafood restaurants in Schaumburg" query, the search retrieved four answers: Bonefish Grill, Yu's Mandarin, Shaw's Crab House and Joe's Crab Shack. Although these are valid restaurants, I know that Schaumburg has more than four of them.

In fact I found 20 restaurants including Davis Fishmarket, McCormick & Schmick's, Benihana, Foster's Shrimp House, Dover Straits, Pete Miller's etc. And ten of them had reviews on Metromix but you had to hunt them under "Greek", "Japanese", "Steakhouse" and other categories.

Even though Weber Grill, for instance, is not specifically a fish and seafood restaurant, their level of service and quality of food in general would still affect me as a consumer. But the public needs to be aware of four issues.

Firstly, that people who write about restaurant visits are people who are passionate enough to share their extreme pleasure or disappointment about a visit. But since most are not in that category, the reviewers cannot represent the public at large. A restaurant like Shaw's takes care of an estimated 100,000 guests a year for only 12 wrote a review. We need to understand that although I value their opinion, how relevant is this sample?

Secondly, do you know how difficult it is to make one person happy? Now is it possible to make 10,000, 50,000, or 100,000 people happy all the time? Of course not, nor is it desirable. So a certain amount of public disapproval is inevitable but also necessary. If you were to devout your resources to appeal to everyone and to make everyone content all the time, you would inevitably loose focus but also your profits. So I caution readers about paying too much attention to the negative reviews.

Thirdly, whether your decision criterion is distance from your home, the menu selection, pricing or anything else, none of the website actually helps you compare restaurants. You get bits and pieces from one site and another but the decision is ultimately your responsibility alone.

And the fourth issue is that writing a restaurant review does not help restauranteurs with feedbacks to improve their performance. It is like completing your school assignments but the teachers only informing your classmates and not you, about your grades. Somehow it feels counterproductive.

So I picked up my collection of menus and began a selection process. Menus with seafood: 89. In Schaumburg: 25. With at least five dinner under $20: 12. With many seafood appetizers too: 3. My final selection dwindled to three finalists: the Greek Taverna, Houlihan's and Outback Steakhouse.

The Greek Taverna, already my favorite for lamb dishes, offers 11 fish and seafood dinners priced from $12.95 and $16.95. Houlihan's menu counts 7 dinners from $13.95 and $18.95 while Outback Steakhouse had also seven items between $8.99 and $20.99. Based on fish and seafood dinner price average alone, Applebee's and TGI Friday's would have been solid contenders.

In the end, my family and I chose the Greek Village Taverna on Golf and Plum Grove Road by the Ford dealership. We liked the place already. They had a wide selection of dishes I wanted for an average price of $14.04 which is very reasonable, and my parents could also find something they liked. Restaurant reviews were no longer a factor. Ten people on Metromix rated the food a 2.0 out of a maximum of 5.0. But my family and I were happy, and we will return to the Greek Village again.


The Greek Village Taverna is located at 795 E. Golf Road, Schaumburg 60173. (847) 885-4950.