Q: Who are the Reader Restaurant Raters?
A: The Raters are a group of more than 2,000 restaurant-loving
Reader readers who have volunteered to help us put together
the definitive Chicago-area dining guide.
Q: Dining guide? In the Reader?
A: In the Reader and on the Web. It's available online in
the Reader
Restaurant Finder and is excerpted weekly in the printed
Reader.
Q: You mean you're publishing restaurant listings written by
your readers?
A: In a few cases, yes. But the majority of our listings are
compiled and written by Reader staff.
Q: So what do you need the Restaurant Raters for?
A: The Restaurant Raters provide us with a stream of information
that no editor or even staff could hope to collect alone - constant
evaluations of food quality and service, descriptions of decor and
clientele from a Reader reader's perspective, even
up-to-the-minute info on openings, closings, personnel and policy
changes, and more. Think of them as an army of restaurant reporters
constantly combing the city for the latest news and trends.
Q: What do they do exactly?
A: Every time a Restaurant Rater eats in a restaurant - and some do
so more than 20 times a month - he or she completes a detailed
questionnaire on the experience. Some of the questions are
quantitative; for example, Raters use a five-point scale to grade
several aspects of a restaurant's food, including flavor and aroma,
tactile characteristics (temperature, texture, etc), and quality
and freshness of ingredients. Other questions are more descriptive:
Raters characterize the crowd and atmosphere and are invited to
submit detailed comments on any aspect of the meal. The
quantitative info is used to calculate ratings on each restaurant's
food, service, value, and so on; the more subjective information is
read and digested by our restaurant staff and incorporated into the
listings they write. Raters' general comments are also available to
Web users who wish to read them.
Q: Do the Raters get paid?
A: No, it's strictly a volunteer effort. We provide some perks and
incentives, but mostly they participate because restaurants are an
important part of their lives and they like the idea of sharing
their opinions with thousands of fellow Chicagoans.
Q: Do they get their meals free?
A: No. We do not reimburse them and we ask them not to reveal to
restaurateurs that they're part of our group.
Q: How does this scheme differ from other survey-based
restaurant guides?
A: It differs in three important respects: (1) Because the Reader
Restaurant Finder was built from the ground up as a real-time,
online system, we are able to revise our listings daily, and our
army of reporters feeds us information constantly. Our "survey"
never stops and our data will never grow stale. (2) Our online
search engine is organized to reflect the way you really
choose a restaurant - not only by cuisine and price, but also
according to what else you have planned for the evening. You can
search by proximity to more than 200 clubs, theaters, and landmark
buildings. Finally (3), because our Raters are all Reader
readers, they focus on the restaurants, the neighborhoods, and the
qualities that Reader readers care about. Perhaps the
biggest difference between our listings and the rest, in other
words, is that we're the Reader and they're not!
