Top 100 SF Restaurants Redux

The 2007 San Francisco Chronicle Top 100 Restaurant list was just published today, so I have revised my interactive chart for exploring various aspects of the top entries in San Francisco. I did this previously for the 2006 list using IBM’s Many Eyes, analyzing the SF entries and evaluating the relationships among the rating categories.

Click on the figure to the right to be taken to the website where you can easily plot data on the top SF restaurants according to your choosing. I’ve chosen to plot Food Rating on the horizontal axis, Price on the Vertical axis, and Overall Quality as symbol size. After you click on the figure, you can hover your mouse over each data point and see to which restaurant each corresponds. 

As with last year’s list, Ton Kiang continues to be the best valued restaurant in San Francisco (near the right-bottom: high food quality, low price), with Chow, Range, and Delfina among the next best valued.

One wonders why Kokkari is still in the Top 100 given how it sticks out from the crowd (it’s the tiny dot near the left-top: low food quality, high price). Kokkari used to be a top restaurant in the city, and I wonder if its continued Top 100 presence is simply due to lethargy in updating the list. I noticed that every new restaurant that I added to the list this year had solid 3 ratings across the board while Kokkari has mediocre ratings in each category—which is painfully obvious using the Many Eyes plot—except in atmosphere. There are 73 restaurants in San Francisco with an Overall Quality rating of 3 stars or more—why does the Top 100 list only 52 of them? And why do Hog Island Oyster Company and Tartine Bakery, both entries in the Top 100 Restaurant list, not have any Overall Quality rating at all from the SF Chronicle? Is it because they do not really qualify as restaurants?

As with last time, I did a correlational analysis of the restaurants to see what was responsible for the high ratings, and to see what higher prices bought a customer and what, if anything, is associated with good service.

The data above (see my previous post for an explanation of what this analysis means) shows how each category rating is related to each other. The closer to a value of 1, the more the two categories are related; the closer to a value of 0, the less the two categories are related.

Many of the same relationships hold from last year. The Overall Quality score was predominantly determined by Food Rating (correlation 0.88).  This reflects what criteria chief restaurant critic, Michael Bauer, uses to come up with his Overall Quality score (what the SF Chronicle refers to as a restaurant’s rating).

Noisiness was more correlated with the overall score this year (-0.35 this year vs -0.18 last year). Paying more will now get you slightly better service (0.36 this year vs 0.22 last year), although a correlation of 0.36 is still pathetically small—I’d like to see this number well above 0.5. Last year, the only thing that paying more seemed to get you was better atmosphere, but this year the Price is as correlated with Atmosphere (0.6) as it is with Overall Quality (0.56).

Note: I have not considered levels of statistical significance in this analysis, nor have I considered partial correlations which would be a more accurate but more time-consuming approach to this analysis.

Comments

[Beebah Ghorai]

I absolutely agree that Kokkari is over-rated and does not deserve to be on this list. I wonder if it remains for the sake of ethnic diversity on the list as opposed to any lethargy on the reviewers part? I do maintain that Greek food just doesn't lend itself to gourmet dining and Kokkari only hits that point home!

[bwedwards]

Regarding Kokkari, I heard from Michael Bauer that its ratings in the SF Chronicle may not be up to date; that is, Kokkari is deserving of being on the Top 100, but it's ratings haven't been updated to reflect its inclusion. You'll note that there are no Thai restaurants on the Top 100, a glaring omission if there were an ethnic-inclusive agenda to the list.

I don't understand why you say that Greek food can't be gourmet. To my mind, any cuisine can be upped in creativity and quality to a gourmet level. If Mac&Cheese can be made gourmet, anything can :)

FWIW, I've had several great meals at Kokkari's sister restaurant, Evvia in Palo Alto. Kokkari has a much higher-end atmosphere that Evvia but both have the same menu, I think. Both used to be quite good in my experience, but I haven't been to either in several years.

[Greg M]

Nice visualization, I'd suggest adding a few "isoquant lines" (fancy name for the boundaries of regions having equal distance between price and quality levels, e.g. the lines where [Quality - Price = 1]. Helps group 'similar' restaurants together on the approximate basis of their 'value'.

... and bummer to hear about Kokkari! Used to be a favorite when I lived in SF until recently, albeit a pricey favorite...

[bwedwards]

Hi Greg,

Good idea on the isoquant lines, would help make the data more digestable and cluster the restaurants together.

Nice thing about SF is that for every restaurant in decline, there are several others starting up great things.