Jay Rayner’s tips on choosing a restaurant

April 27, 2023 by
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If you are traveling to a new destination or live in a large city with oodles of restaurants, it can be difficult to determine which ones are worth your time (and money). While there are review sites like Yelp, they can be hit or miss, so it’s wise to use additional criteria to judge whether a place is worthy of consideration. Critic Jay Rayner knows a thing or two about restaurants, and he recently shared the techniques he uses to decide where to dine.

He starts by looking at the menu – not just what dishes are on offer, but beginning with the design of the menu itself, all the way down to the font. “Dismiss anywhere that uses comic sans or the like. If they have so little taste in typography, what hope is there when it comes to the food? Equally, be suspicious of somewhere that uses a grandiose italic,” he advises. Beyond the font, Rayner tells us to be wary of restaurants that use superfluous adjectives or certain phrases like “mouth-watering”.

Rayner says that online reviews and rankings can be useful, but first, there needs to be critical mass: forget about ratings where there are fewer than 200 reviews, he advises, as there isn’t enough information for them to be reliable. As to the content of the reviews, Rayner is blunt: “For God’s sake, don’t read them. There’s enough trauma in the world without volunteering to witness the brutalisation of the English language.” He also acknowledges that even when a restaurant is the recipient of glowing reviews, you may still end up with an unsatisfactory experience. But without risk, there is no reward.

Category: Antipasto

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7 Comments

  • slimmer  on  April 28, 2023

    Bit of a snob, isn’t he?

  • averythingcooks  on  April 28, 2023

    I have to say that dismissing a restaurant based on their menu font choice seems….something. I’m not sure of the word I want but I know the whole idea leaves me cold.

  • matag  on  April 28, 2023

    In most cases, I doubt that the chef decides what font to use on the menu as I’m sure the font decider doesn’t determine how much salt to put in the soup.

  • FuzzyChef  on  May 3, 2023

    That’s possibly the least helpful restaurant picking advice I’ve heard.

  • goodfruit  on  May 8, 2023

    Wow, and here I thought I would pick up a tip or two for my upcoming roadtrip. The font? OK, I’m going back to judging a guy by the car he drives.

    Here’s my advice; read the reviews and go for a baseline, what are the overall recommendations? Read the menu and see if it has dishes on it that you love to eat. Look over a few of the pix posted and see if any of looks like it’s been plated nicely. Decide whether to go there or not.

  • Kennyflose  on  July 24, 2024

    I read Jay Rayner’s tips on choosing a restaurant and noticed they’re spot on! One thing that stood out was his advice on checking out the menu before you go. It’s so true that a good menu can tell you a lot about a place. It might be a red flag if it’s all over the place with a zillion different cuisines. Conversely, a focused menu usually means they know what they’re doing.

  • Kennyflose  on  July 24, 2024

    And let’s remember the importance of online reviews. While you can’t trust everyone, a consensus can give you a decent idea of what to expect. I also like to check https://www.mklibrary.com/best-sacramento-restaurants/ everyone’s.com for some great recommendations and honest reviews.

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