The last time I handed out stars, in March 2020, there were two – a “good” rating – for a Nepali restaurant called Everest Kitchen in Ashburn.
Since then, the words “unranked during the pandemic” have accompanied my weekly column on meals.
The break seemed like the right thing to do. At the start of the pandemic, restaurants struggled to get food out in boxes and bags. Later, when the dining rooms reopened, it still didn’t seem fair to note a place where staff remained an issue; Since I introduced a zero to four, mediocre to superlative star system in 2003, ratings have taken into account service and ambience as well as food quality.
And now? I can count on one hand the number of readers who have told me they want the stars back. Many other followers, including chefs, told me that an unrated review encouraged them to read the column more. “Thank you for your wonderful decision to suspend restaurant ratings under your star system during the pandemic,” read a handwritten note from an anonymous author last year. “Please make it permanent. Writing and eating out are both art.
People talked and I thought. It’s time to give up the stars.
The reason I rolled out the rating system in the first place was because I thought the stars, simple and straightforward, gave readers an immediate view of a restaurant – and the stars were as close as you can get in this country a universal rating system for meals. establishments. (Before my tenure, the last time the Washington Post used a charting device to rate restaurants, the Sunday magazine was called Potomac and the symbols were smiley faces. Hey, that was 1976.) There’s twenty years, I believed that the stars were a way to give my public something more. In the beginning, I encountered difficulties in the rankings; there was, for example, a big gap between one star and two, “satisfactory” and “good”, respectively. In 2005 I tried to tweak the reward system by adding half stars to the equation. Half stars seemed to put a finer point on my feelings about a place.
Since the pandemic, I’ve had plenty of time to think about the ratings. I’ve come to the conclusion that readers don’t need charts to help them decide where to eat, and that star ratings have actually deterred some of my audience from going to certain restaurants. Someone once told me, “I don’t read less than three stars” – an “excellent” rating – and I couldn’t help but think of all the “good” restaurants that lacked nothing than looking at the stars. (On top of that, three-star reviews were rare, hard to come by for restaurants. I didn’t want to be known as someone who handed out rewards just for participating.) A friend suggested I upgrade to a numbered system, but his idea seemed complicated, yet another way of saying “stars”.
Stars put restaurants in an unfortunate box. A memorable place for, say, a few dishes or great hospitality would be unlikely to get more than two stars. But don’t many of us know places like this, where just a few dishes or extra attention are precisely the reasons we choose to come back to the restaurant again and again? This kind of admiration – even affection – is hard to capture in points.
Especially now, given all the challenges in the industry, restaurants deserve more than a symbol to sum them up. Words allow nuance. Stars, not so much.
Ultimately, I’d like to think that reading the entire review (a reviewer can dream!) is the best way to determine if you and the restaurant will be a good fit.
Change can be good. The introduction of sound checks in 2008 gave readers information they could use to find out if conversation was possible in the restaurants I reviewed. Stars are now a thing of the past, but recent years have seen the introduction of details you told me you wanted to see, including information on accessibility, outdoor dining and, more recently, pandemic protocols .
In 2019, Pineapple & Pearls on Capitol Hill was one of a handful of establishments that I rated four stars, a “superlative” dining experience. I considered announcing the end of the ratings in my recent review of the reimagined restaurant, whose owner, chef Aaron Silverman, told me he wanted to “crush to the ground” the traditional fine-dining model. (Readers probably wondered how the new version compared to the original; hopefully my latest review answered the question.) I decided to wait for the fall restaurant guide, my biggest roundup of reviews each year, to announce my decision.
If leaders can smash things on the ground, critics can too.
