What Do Restaurant Ratings Mean?

Food critics are often hired by newspapers, magazines, blogs, and websites to travel to different restaurants, order a variety of dishes, and write about their experiences. You may have heard of the unique restaurant rating system of Michelin, but do you know what the coveted MICHELIN stars mean? Here's a quick guide to the symbols you can find in the MICHELIN Guide. Michelin inspectors are like private detectives for quality food. They are known for their culinary experience and their great passion for food. Since they visit restaurants without warning, they must blend in with the crowd.

Several major newspapers employ restaurant critics and publish online food guides for the cities they serve, such as the Irish Independent for Irish restaurants. In the United States, several states have implemented uniform state restaurant classification systems. According to these systems, safety and health inspection reports are used to calculate numerical scores or ratings with letters, and restaurants must display them prominently. Two Stanford University economics researchers found that restaurants with higher ratings saw an increase in their revenues, while restaurants with lower ratings saw their revenues decrease. Restaurant ratings identify restaurants based on their quality, using annotations such as stars or other symbols or numbers. After the implementation of the restaurant rating system, the quality of restaurants across the country became more acceptable, and the average score went from about 75% to almost 90%.

Rather than simply listing violations in a report, the restaurant inspection system was changed to a points system, in which each restaurant began each inspection with a perfect score of 100 points.

Marcos Furno
Marcos Furno

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