Can you believe Zagat? Not always

I love Woody Allen’s movies, Billy Crystal’s Oscar monologues and Darrell Hammond’s impressions on “Saturday Night Live.” But nothing makes me laugh as much as the Zagat dining guide for Los Angeles.

Zagat, as everyone but Saddam Hussein must know by now, is the New York-based publishing empire that releases those narrow, red guidebooks rating restaurants in more than 30 U.S. and Canadian cities and regions, plus Paris, London, Tokyo and several neighboring solar systems.

Zagat ratings are not made by restaurant critics or any other “experts.” Zagat voters are normal, everyday diners -- 6,060 of whom cast ballots, online, for the newly published 2004 Los Angeles/Southern California guide.

The highest-rated restaurants -- Matsuhisa and Katsu-ya -- each got 28 points out of 30. The next 19 restaurants got 27 points apiece. According to Zagat, these 21 restaurants represent the very best dining in Los Angeles.

Zagat is enormously successful and enormously influential -- a veritable bible for tourists, business travelers and local residents alike. But how can you trust “surveyors” -- as Zagat calls its voters -- who choose as the best restaurants in all of Greater Los Angeles some restaurants that aren’t even the best in their own neighborhoods?

Take the stupefyingly high ratings for Derek’s in Pasadena, Restaurant Christine in Torrance and Gina Lee’s Bistro in Redondo Beach.

All three were 27-point winners. Since the front of the book lists them in the order they finished in the voting, that means Zagat says Derek’s, Christine and Gina Lee’s are all better than Spago, Angelini Osteria, L’Orangerie, Alex, Grace and dozens of restaurants that are substantially better. And Derek’s (which Zagat says is the eighth-best restaurant in the L.A. area) is also ranked above Sona, Water Grill, Chinois on Main, Campanile and Valentino.

What are these voters smoking?

Derek’s, a thoroughly pleasant, thoroughly decent restaurant, is described by Zagat voters as “excellent” and “fantastic” -- the best example of “Californian cuisine” we have.

It is none of the above.

Nor is Gina Lee’s a “jewel.” But both are gems compared with Christine, which Zagat says offers “dazzlingly creative, perfectly executed dishes.”

It’s the chef who should be executed.

My dinner at Restaurant Christine last week was not just pedestrian but aggressively bad. Every single course my guest and I had was awful, but none was worse than the tempura soft shell crabs with fufu, tamarillos, mustard greens and fruit salsa. Our waitress said the salsa included carrot, ginger and “many tropical fruits, [including] watermelon, green apples and honeydew.” It couldn’t have tasted worse if it had been made with shredded Fruit of the Loom.

Everyone’s entitled to his own opinion, of course. Half the fun of talking about restaurants -- or politicians or athletes or movies -- is disagreeing over which is best. But apart from the recent recall campaign, Zagat is the best example I’ve ever seen of democracy run amok. Differences of opinion are fine. There have to be some standards, though.

In fairness -- and to avoid any accusation of personal pique -- I should say that most of the restaurants my food-loving friends and I think are the city’s best do well in Zagat. We may disagree with their precise ranking and point totals at times, but none is ignored or severely underrated.

My complaint is Zagat’s tendency to ridiculously overrate many restaurants. This year it’s worse than ever, but it’s happened before with, among others, C’est Fan Fan, voted the second-best restaurant in the city in 1992; with Cafe Bizou, voted sixth-best in ‘96; and with Brent’s Deli -- Brent’s Deli?!? -- rated 16th-best in 2000.

I can still remember 1989, when Magdalena in Bellflower was named the seventh-best restaurant here -- better than Michael’s, Rex, La Toque, Citrus and Valentino, five of the city’s best restaurants of that (or any) era.

Neither I nor any of my friends had ever heard of Magdalena. But, always eager for new discoveries, several of us raced instantly to Bellflower.

What we found was slightly better than a diner.

No matter. The next year, Magdalena rose to fifth in the Zagat ratings.

Merrill Shindler, who has edited the Los Angeles guide for Zagat since the first edition, in 1987 -- and who selects the pithy comments (“haiku,” he calls it) that appear with each rating -- says the explanation for such restaurants doing so well in the voting is simple:

“They’re fine restaurants,” he says. “Christine is a lovely restaurant.

“One of my commitments as editor has been to give the guides really good geographic diversity,” Shindler told me last week, “so when I hear about a cool restaurant some distance from ... the Westside, I head for it.”

If he likes it, he puts it on the Zagat ballot. But no restaurant gets a top, “front-of-the-book” rating unless a lot of people vote for it -- at least 100 people, according to Tim Zagat, who co-founded Zagat with his wife Nina in New York in 1979.

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By the numbers

Zagat says several safeguards are built into the process to prevent ballot-stuffing, and I’m inclined to believe him.

But the votes are averaged. Surveyors rate restaurants from 1 to 3 points. The numbers for each restaurant are then added up, the total is divided by the number of voters and multiplied by 10 (hence the 30-point maximum).

A relatively small number of voters giving high scores to restaurants they know and love -- restaurants that many others haven’t driven to or voted on -- could yield a high average.

The 21 restaurants that received the top ratings of 27 or 28 points received an average of 455 votes each -- out of more than 6,000; Christine, Derek’s and Gina Lee’s each received fewer than 300 votes (compared, say, with 1,001 for Campanile and 992 for Water Grill).

People who live in gastronomic wastelands may give their local favorites “very high grades,” Zagat acknowledged. “It may be that sometimes those restaurants get an extra benefit.”

They sure do. And I don’t say that as some lazy, Westside elitist. I live in Silver Lake -- and I’ll go anywhere for a good meal.

That brings me to Zagat’s best of Los Angeles, according to the 2004 guide.

The top three -- and five of the top six -- are sushi restaurants. Are all of them really better than all the city’s top French, Italian, Chinese, Indian, Thai, Latin and Middle Eastern restaurants?

“There’s a perception that sushi has a point of perfection that cooked food perhaps does not have,” says Shindler. “It may be the perfection that comes out of absolute simplicity.”

OK. I appreciate simplicity. I may have a Eurocentric palate, but I love Asian food -- including sushi. When Masa Takayama was running Ginza Sushi-ko, I thought he offered one of the great dining experiences in the entire country.

But Matsuhisa -- No. 1 in the new Zagat for the last five years and seven of the last eight -- is not Ginza Sushi-ko. Yes, Nobu Matsuhisa is an excellent chef, but with nine restaurants in six cities on three continents -- including Nobu Malibu, which Zagat calls the third-best restaurant in L.A. -- how often is he here? And even when he is here, I’ve just never been dazzled.

But -- chacun a son gout -- some of my friends disagree; so let’s set Matsuhisa aside. According to the new Zagat, the second-best restaurant in Los Angeles -- the only one other than Matsuhisa to earn the top, 28-point rating -- is Katsu-ya, in Studio City, which received a whopping 140 votes.

Katsu-ya isn’t even the second-best sushi restaurant on Ventura Blvd.

The top-rated non-Japanese restaurant in the Zagat guide is Melisse in Santa Monica. I like Melisse, but I’ll leave it to others to argue whether it’s really better than the city’s other top white tablecloth restaurants.

It isn’t only at the high end that I find Zagat’s ratings laughable, though. I like barbecue more than almost anything this side of sex, and I know of no one who shares my ‘cue passion who doesn’t think Phillips, in Leimert Park, is the best barbecue joint in the city. Zagat doesn’t even mention Phillips. Or Woody’s. Or Leo’s. Or any of the other barbecue pits in black L.A.

Is that because there are so few black voters for Zagat?

“No,” says Shindler. “We actually do quite well in black neighborhoods.”

But Zagat’s five top-rated barbecue spots -- with 16 locations among them -- are virtually all in white suburbs. No. 1 is Johnny Rebs’ Southern Roadhouse, which has outlets in Bellflower and Long Beach -- the latter practically next door to an exclusive country club.

There was about as much smoky soul in the ribs I had there last week as there is in a Barry Manilow concert.

Does all this mean Zagat is useless? No. I buy three copies every year -- one each for my house, my car and my office. They’re telephone books and memory-joggers. If I find myself in, say, Pasadena, after a movie, on a Sunday night, I’ll happily consult Zagat to remind myself what’s open and to get a phone number.

But I’m about as likely to base my restaurant choice on their ratings as I am to base my TV watching on the Nielsen ratings.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.