A Guide to Finer Dining Courtesy of the Zagats

Here’s a tip for dining out: If you ever eat at a restaurant, take the Zagats with you.

Not just the restaurant guides. The people who publish them. Tim and Nina Zagat are the discriminating diner’s secret weapon. Like restaurant critics, their names suggest a taste for sybaritic experiences. Unlike restaurant critics, the Zagats can use their own names in making reservations because the opinions their surveys promulgate aren’t theirs; they’re yours.

“When we go to restaurants, sometimes you see truffles on top of everything, and you don’t see that many truffles on anybody else’s table,” Tim says. “We do get better than we deserve.”

Which is why we are delighted to be gathered here today. We’re chatting with the Zagats over Peking duck at Yujean Kang’s restaurant on Melrose in honor of the couple’s 20th anniversary. For their guides, that is. Zagat Surveys, which rate restaurants in more than 40 U.S. and foreign cities, have become so iconic that the New York Times declared them “almost as vital to the American traveler as clean socks.” And if you travel without clean socks, we don’t want to know.

Before our memorable lunch is over, Kang himself will have greeted us at our table not once, but twice, after selecting the wine and the dishes. Oh, yes. And cooking our meals personally.

Needless to say, when Joe Shmoe is hungry, he’ll probably have to manage without such tender loving care. But if Joe Shmoe is a restaurant critic--even if he pretends he’s John Doe--he’ll probably have a tastier time of it than the average citizen.

“Restaurant critics go around with this nonsense about not being recognized, and virtually all of them are recognized,” Tim says. “A restaurant critic can do a real service in doing an intelligent, in-depth analysis of a restaurant. But the fact is that a restaurant critic eats different food than the average person in different quantities cooked by different people.

“Let’s say you have 10 people in the kitchen, typical of a Chinese restaurant like this one. They usually have several woks, and Yujean is the most senior person so he cooks for you, me and a handful of friends of the restaurant. The second wok is usually the guy who does most of the day-in, day-out cooking. The lower woks are the apprentices. So who’s cooking for you is a matter of who you are. And it’s the same in a French restaurant. A big salmon that didn’t sell out yesterday is a special of the day for everybody in the restaurant except the restaurant critic.”

Yum. The only thing better than eating the dishes is dishing them.

Well, restaurateurs, do your darndest. All the beluga caviar in the world won’t sway the Zagats’ surveys of patrons because the couple doesn’t participate in them. And while the Zagats may scale the Mt. Olympus of fine dining three or four times a week, the former corporate lawyers sometimes have to deal with the same restaurant bugaboo as we mere mortals--lousy service.

“We’re making a big point of telling the industry this year that the biggest single problem is service, and it’s got to start dealing with that,” Tim says.

“In Los Angeles, we asked the question, ‘What is the single thing that irritates you most?’ Sixty-eight percent of the comments were service-oriented. People complained about everything under the sun, from being rudely handled on the phone by fancy restaurant reservationists who act like they don’t want you to come at all, to arriving on time and having to stand around the lobby with a crowd of people bumping into you for half an hour or more, to being rushed through a meal, and having waiters with attitude.”

The Zagats are putting cash where their mouths are. This year, they’re donating money to cooking schools to encourage chefs to improve servers’ table-side manners.

“It happens to be in the self-interest of restaurants,” Tim says. “You can make a lot more money if you’re a little bit nicer. It’s called a smile.”

Check.

Irene Lacher’s Out & About column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Page 2.