Readers' Representative Journal

A conversation on newsroom ethics and standards

Category: Food and Drink

No more stars in Times restaurant reviews

The Times' Daily Dish blog has a post from Food Editor Russ Parsons with an explanation about a new way of rating restaurants: 

Starting this week, The Times will no longer run star ratings with our restaurant reviews. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, star ratings are increasingly difficult to align with the reality of dining in Southern California -- where your dinner choices might include a food truck, a neighborhood ethnic restaurant, a one-time-only pop-up run by a famous chef, and a palace of fine dining. Clearly, you can’t fairly assess all these using the same rating system. Furthermore, the stars have never been popular with critics because they reduce a thoughtful and nuanced critique to a simple score. In its place, we’ll offer a short summary of the review.

 

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