First off, it's been fun to see this post spread across the interwebs since I first wrote it one caffeine-fueled day just over a week ago (first Menéame, now here) and for the heck of it, I thought I would clarify a few things;

This post was (sortof) a meme. Sure, I "understood the assignment" and performed the quick "study" ("analysis" might be more fitting) for the sake of the original post over on r/gis, but I was surprised to see how seriously others took the matter. I suppose good kebabs are a serious matter.

As others have pointed out, a linear correlation was likely a flawed approach for testing the "hypothesis". Though the original wording from the french post which first brought this to my attention implied as much, in hindsight it's likely that the kebab shops within a certain radius are on average worse than the rest.

Also, it seemed that Paris was one of the worse study areas. It, apparently, has some very good kebab shops that just so happen to be in close proximity to train stations.

I suppose I need to start working on part 2....

I think your study would have been much more interesting (but not that algorithmically challenging...) if you only included the large train stations in Paris.

On the other hand, metro station are pretty much anywhere, and they tend to have the opposite effect. Having a metro station close by is very practical and doesn't generate as much nuisance since it is underground and pretty well hidden.

I am almost sure the data will look very different if you only look for train station.

I'm not saying which modes of thinking are more rational or superior or anything of that sort, just that the seemingly instinctive distinction you have described is not necessarily so to everybody.

That is what matters here.

Do you know the difference between "train" and "subway", because "the metro" is just a subway, just like in NYC or commonly found elsewhere in almost any large city.

I can hop onto Tokaido Main southbound at Tokyo with $1 ticket and get off at same Tokaido Main platform at Kyoto, or vice versa, or same for Ueno to snowy Aomori through Tohoku Main, if I didn't mind paying $60 outstanding fee and a 12-hour 5 train change long "metro" experience and "oh come on" look at the gate. By all definitions the Tokaido or Tohoku line are a "metro" rail, and uses some of same models of rolling stocks(cars) as literal subway services. I can technically do that because there's no hard distinctions between metro and train in the system I'm familiar with but the rails are rails and rails go everywhere.

European cities tend not to have that, and instead have often Y shaped branches off international long-distance rail networks that comes in and backs out of a "City Central" station, where it connects to local train services like trams and subways. This is due to Europe long having concept of city boundaries where city-ness of cities roll off sharp and somewhat abruptly ends, and many cities have not expanded enough to fuse together like late-game Civ maps.

Yes, I am aware, what I'm saying is that not everyone knows and you have to say it. You can't say, like, the author's stupid to not be aware of obvious distinction.

I'd say mostly Montparnasse, Gare de Lyon, Gare de l'Est, Gare du Nord, and Austerlitz.

RER, Transilien, Metro and Tramway stations would not count as "train stations" in the eyes of a Parisian/French person, and places outside of the Périphérique (the ring road that follows the old defensive "Thier walls" of the city) would not count as "Paris" for this kind of conversation.

And it is not for lack of trying. City planners since at least the 1850ies have been trying to improve the areas surrounding large train stations.

Perhaps distance to a non-metro station (eg a TER "mainline" station like Gare du Nord) would give more representative results?

I wait with interest.

If your restaurant has bad location and bad food, it is not going to stay in business very long.

After that you can have a mix of all, but if you remove the "bad/bad" restaurant there is a correlation that appears, but it is due to the collider bias.

This sounds like the correlation appears because of you throwing away some data, but the way I see it, that correlation is real - you're not removing the bad/bad restaurants, the market is.

I've been reading up on collider bias on Wiki and pondering the examples[0] - restaurants, dating, celebrities - and the way I see it, the biased statistics is still true for whoever is doing the classification (person visiting fast-food restaurants, or looking for a date), and if their selection (taste) generalizes, it might also carry over to the general population.

I feel the restaurant example from Wiki, with its associated image below, is worth discussing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox#/media/Fil...

"An illustration of Berkson's Paradox. The top graph represents the actual distribution, in which a positive correlation between quality of burgers and fries is observed. However, an individual who does not eat at any location where both are bad observes only the distribution on the bottom graph, which appears to show a negative correlation."

This feels wrong to me. Why is the regression line nearly horizontal when, eyeballing the graph, a nearly vertical one would fit better and capture an even stronger positive correlation between qualities of hamburgers and fries? In fact, I'm tempted to even throw away the leftmost and rightmost points on the lower panel as outliers.

Anyway, this example assumes the bad/bad restaurants are not visited by the subject - however, if we take your scenario where bad/bad restaurants quickly go out of business, then it's the market that creates the correlation between those two hypothetically independent qualities, so as long as we're talking real world and not some imaginary spherical restaurants in frictionless vacuum, it would be fair to say the correlation exists (and that the causal mechanism behind it is market selection).

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

In OP's case, however, the correlation did NOT seem to exist.

> With a mighty Pearson's correlation of 0.091, the data indicates that this could be true!

I almost choked on this bit, as I was eating a sandwich (not a kebab sadly)

Having lived in Berlin and Stockholm (and a few other cities), I'd say Stockholm has by far the worst kebab options of all places I've lived, while Berlin was the best one.

I'm curious whether this is reflected in local reviews, or whether the locals just lower or heighten their standards based on the what the average food quality is like.

I'm not sure about Stockholm, or Sweden in general, when it comes to kebabs, but kebabs in Norway bear little resemblance to the kebabs I get in London. And the UK now has a chain serving "German" kebabs, which again are significantly different from the kebabs we get from Turkish takeaway places and restaurants here... It's not that they're better or worse - I might crave one or the other depending on what I'm in the mood for, as they're almost different dishes.

So, comparing cities against each other is a lot harder than comparing differences in local opinion by location within a city.

London of course has the two styles, |Turkish| and Turkish via Germany.

  Verdict
  NO
  
  The Döner Kebab was not invented in Berlin.
  
  Popularised here? Ok.
  But there are no participation trophies for that.

Turkish immigrants introduced it in Germany in 70's. However it is true that the current version of Doner kebap in Germany is quite different than Turkish counterparts. (Sauces, toppings etc)

It is true that in Turkey, you'll find the Döner Iskendar (cubes of bread, covered in döner meat, covered in sauce, on a plate) as a very common dish, but to claim that the street food variant was new in the 70's is insane. There are a ton of people alive today who can refute that, trivially.

I don't want to find out how bad the kebabs are in Sweden and other places you hear the from like some US cities if you think Berlin kebab is high quality in comparison.

I know getting something on the same level as Rüyam would be impossible; but I would pay a not-insignificant money for something resembling a random Bude near my old place.

I now live in Malmö, which has a much higher number of people from Middle-Eastern countries, so their cuisine is also a lot better than what you can get in Stockholm. However, since I've also become vegetarian in the intervening years I could not tell you what the local quality of the kebab is. Falafel is pretty passable though. And one of my Iraqi friends has said the better places in Malmö win the "least disappointing experience in Sweden compared to home" award, for what it's worth.

Shawarma is basically a variation of the same dish:

    "The shawarma technique—grilling a vertical stack of meat slices and cutting it off as it cooks—first appeared in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century in the form of döner kebab,[1][14][15] which both the Greek gyros and the Levantine shawarma are derived from."

This is frankly odd, given that for most cuisines I can point at some other place surpassing the original. The best Italian food I've had has been in Chicago, the best Mexican food I've had is in San Diego. You can find extremely good authentic Chinese food in the Bay Area if you know where to look, but I can't say I've covered enough of China to confidently decide a winner there.

At least in Germany I suspect it has something to do with Germans considering it cheap fast food and as such are very price sensitive - there's only so much you can do when you have to cut every expense as much as possible.

> With a mighty Pearson's correlation of 0.091, the data indicates that this could

> be true! If you ignore the fact that the correlation is so weak that calling it 'statistically

> insignificant' would be quite generous.

I actually came to a different conclusion than the author. Here is the way I'm thinking about the presented statistics:

1. There is 17 Kebab shops (out of 400 samples) with a google review lower than 3 stars. Let's call them "bad kebabs".

2. All those "bad kebabs" actually located within 500m from the nearest station. No kebab located in further than >500m is bad.

3. So if you've ever gotten a bad donor kebab, we can safely assume that you have purchased it from a kebab shop near a train station.

Maybe there are so many kebab eaters near a train station that a mediocre kebab offering becomes profitable?

At least here, the majority of 1-2 star reviews are actually complaining about third-party delivery services like Foodora[1].

Of course the fries will be soggy and the burger luke warm when you got a guy who had to pedal a bike for half an hour to deliver it for you. Like what did you expect?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodora

Right, but this is selection bias. There will always exist a distance D from which all bad kebabs are located.

Unless D is provenly chosen _before_ looking at the data, this has no meaning.

One also has to take the kebab density into account.

On the contrary, if everything was within five meters, that would make the finding much more impressive.

And then there are some really outstanding places with proper char coal grills, staff that knows what they are doing and are friendly and laser focused on customer service. These places are wonderful and generally good value. Some of these marinade their own meat as well and they venture beyond just serving the standard kebabs. If you find yourself in Berlin, worth getting some advice on where to go in your area. There are some amazing kebab restaurants and most of those places have been around for ages.

And then there's a third category of places that you find in the usual late night and travel hot spots targeting travelers or people that are drunk that will probably not be regulars. Competition for this audience is fierce and there are some good choices here that people will take detours for to get to. Many of these places are well run and optimize for throughput and consistency (but not necessarily high quality).

It's really just about making it harder for law enforcement folks to draw associations by looking directly at the bank accounts of several people they suspect are in cahoots. Or, in some cases, about making it harder to trace specific cash serial numbers or other instruments like cheques.

I recall reading of a crime outfit in Australia that would have the elders in their family take their illicit cash and use it to place an endless stream of bets on poker machines. By law they're required to return some high percentage, say, 75%, of the money put into them (the house keeps the rest). If you gamble tens of thousands in those machines, and you don't care about the losses, you get a reasonable expectation value back out as laundered winnings. In that case you don't even have to own the pub with the pokies, that's just how they work.

in reality it just goes home w/ the business owner and/or his people -- sometimes the same day as it's bought. drop off a couple kilos of unsold doner kabab meat to his mom who is retired, hand some out to uncle, etc.

it's hard to trace, and hard to ID -- just some random meat in an old lady's freezer, and may have already ended up in a stew or something -- and in theory should have been disposed of (in theory) anyway per health code regulations.

pretty common technique in use, like, everywhere.

Because if you overprice something in a video game someone might buy it anyway. Because who’s to say the price didn’t spike high for some real world or in game event (like a holiday, a new challenge opening, or a voice actor died and everyone wants to dress like their characters). If you can turn the in game currency back and forth to hard currency, then you can sell a $5 item for $500 and walk away with 90-99% of the value (depending if the company charges a transfer fee).

Except the joke there is, you never even have to pay out! Gift cards to various tradeable "assets" are a reliable way to launder money, or more directly, launder stolen credit card details into usable money.

Where does the laundering come into it? If the machine pays out in cash and you just walk away with it, you've gone from having a big pile of dirty money to having a slightly smaller pile of dirty money. You could declare that the smaller pile is all gambling winnings (off of a low base), but as soon as that gets audited you have to refer the auditor to the casino's security cameras and there you are spending a lot more than you got back.

You could ask the casino to make a formal declaration that your smaller pile of money is gambling winnings (maybe it's chips!), but why should they lie for you?

And if it is chips, you had to buy chips originally. How do you explain how you afforded those chips?

What's the part of this scheme that works?

If you are not big enough fish or have some bad luck, you can slip through quite easily. The key is to keep it down money wise, spread it across many places and random dates. You can't do big sums alone, hence the grandpas in parent comment.

Basically, small crime these days, at least in Europe, is not punished unless you literally steal from police personnel. And if you do it well you can hide bigger crime in sea of small crime.

Maybe AI could help with some of that, but I see often lack of any interest by police to even care that ie your 700 euro phone was stolen, even if you still know its exact location in specific house. No AI is ever fixing that.

You locate people that have winning tickets and offer them certain percent of money over the prize value. For example, if it's a 10K prize, you offer 12 or 13K. The ticket owner gets dirty money and avoids paying taxes on the prize (so they get 40 or 50% more than they would have got with the ticket). The other side gets clean money.

When dirty politicians get audited they find how "lucky" they are, having won lottery tens of times in a couple years or three. What an statistic oddity, huh? ;)

https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2015/12/21/inenglish/14506...

The problem I see with the casino "strategy" is that, as soon as you are audited, your story immediately falls apart. That's a terrible cover. Who needs a defense that can never be penetrated as long as it's never attacked? The idea of laundering is to say something that's difficult to disprove.

> You think taxmen are going to investigate endless hours of video feed from some casino via court order for some 10k win claimed in taxes?

If you have a thousand of them, yes. If you have one, it was a waste of your time and your money to pretend to launder it through slot machines.

Buying the liquor gets a bit fuzzy as to where the money comes from. But the bigger thing is you can have imaginary customers and either drink “their” alcohol, pour it down the drain, or use it for gifts and bribes, all while booking receipts for people who never came into the bar at all.

It’s not that the henchmen spend every ill gotten dollar in the restaurant, it’s that the restaurant looks busy enough for that level of revenue to look even remotely plausible.

The laundered money is reported to the tax office as cash payments from customers. Add some fake invoices from meat suppliers to make your books look legit, and you have converted dirty money into clean, even taxable income.

This only works to a certain degree, though. If the tax office becomes suspicious, they will definitely use undercover people to count customers and meat deliveries over a few weeks. But if for example only 10% of your sales volume is fake, it is quite hard for the tax office to prove this. For smaller laundry volumes, you don't even need fake supplier bills, you can always just claim that you put a bit less meat on the kebap, etc. The general idea is to take advantage of the fact that even the tax office acknowledges that it is impossible to keep books accurate to the last penny in such businesses.

When I was a student I often ate pizza in a really nice Italian restaurant which later turned out to be a money laundering front for the Mafia. But the pizza was great!

In New Zealand "Income that is earned from illegal activities needs to have tax paid on it." however they do try to deter money laundering, tax evasion and tax fraud.

In New Zealand it is getting harder to launder money because cash is not used as much as it used to be. Certainly a legitimate kebab shop should now receive the majority of their money as card payments. Few businesses here would have a majority of takings in cash.

And I imagine card payments do make it harder, but the schemes just become more difficult, which might press on the margins a little. You could always buy your kebab shops overseas. Sell your drugs for Bitcoin, send the Bitcoin to Berlin, exchange them there for Euros, cash them in at your Kebab shop, and then wire them back to New Zealand, bam you're an international investor in the eyes of your government.

At one point our friend told us it was well known that both were owned by the local mafia. If you were to check the books you'd find the place was fully booked every day of the year and doing a roaring trade, while if you actually went and visited you'd find 3 slightly bemused looking English people and maybe a wedding party.

The whole think must be a facade to justify rental income and declared jobs.

> obviously aimed at the money laundering business

Places also provide facade to some social networks. They can keep relatives having a job, can act like a store front for doing whatever deal.

I accept they don’t survive by just serving food, but some of it basically just bad business or some guys to have a legit place for other activities.

A more accurate aphorism would be "You can sell good kebabs anywhere, but you can only sell bad kebabs near a train station."

And if you look at the "minimum viable quality" instead of the overall quality, there does seem to be a linear correlation with the distance. You can use a 5% quantile regressor to easily find the lower edge of the distribution.

I don't think so? It's mostly a result of the fact that (obviously) the best place to sell food is where there are people, which is also the best place to put a metro station. So on average the kebabs are pretty good and on average they're near a station. In Figure 9 one of the worst reviewed restaurants is over 3km from a metro.

You're likely seeing a pattern where there isn't one, which is normal for humans.

There's one obvious place to go around here for a good kebab, it's a few minutes walk to the station, but the way you can tell it's the best place for a kebab is how late it's open every night. Long after other kebab places are dark they're still doing enough business to justify remaining open.

The best place for pizza in my city is very close to a train station but that's a total accident, they park (it's a van, no really, best pizza in the city but they hated owning a restaurant so they put their oven in a van instead) in the car park of a railway station's pub about five minutes walk from me.

Is that a quality signal, or just a sign they don't mind selling to people going back from parties, in various stages of being drunk? I always assumed the latter. Few restaurants (McDonald's and KFC aside) want to work those hours, so whichever does is almost guaranteed a steady trickle of customers who literally have nowhere else to eat (other than home). There isn't much pressure for quality in this situation.

However, thinking about it more carefully, while I've never bought a kebab from them technically the Chaiiwala which is 24/7 does sell kebabs. They're a bit fancier (and of course, more Indian) than the kebab you'd get from the kebab shop but that's definitely a chicken kebab. Their clientèle in the middle of the night are a mix of "gig workers" and people either going to or coming back from prayers (for whichever of the religions is into praying when other people are in bed - Islam and maybe others?). I have never seen drunk young people in there, but it is open 24/7 so that must happen once in a while.

That logic definitely does not apply to SF Bay Area. Most of the places that stay open are all pretty meh. A few pizza by the slice places, Dennys, Grubstake, Orphan Andy's, Mel's. Oakland and LA (SoCal) are no better.

AFAIK most places have no interest in staying open late. Maybe they don't want to stay up. Maybe they don't want to deal with drunks. So, given there are so few, the few that are open have no competition.

I been to / lived in cities that actually have good late night options. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore. California has a curfew which doesn't help.

Insightful!

97.38% of bad studies measure the wrong variable.

Do drunk french people buy kebabs? In my city one central late night kebab place has great kebabs. Anecdotally I remember one great kebab cart serving at least one drunken customer in Nice (France) - not near a station and a long way from the Paris metro!

I think there's some population selection flaws. Drunk people don't leave reviews. In foreign countries it is difficult to know the correct search term.

I suggest an alternative study: how much lager does it need to make a train station kebab taste great?

Yes, very much.

Source: lived in France for two years. Bought a lot of kebabs. Drank with French people a lot.

Also, I really miss French kebabs. They use the thick pide bread, and harissa sauce is always available. Also, if you order an "American" one, they put fries in it.

This is a big difference. There are hundreds of Metro stations in Paris. Everywhere is close to one.

I think the original intent was distance to a train station. If Paris is anything like Rome, close to the railway station is cheap hostels and recent immigrants accommodations.

Let x=[-5..+5] and y=[25,16,9,4,1,0,1,4,9,16,25] (that is, x²). The Pearson correlation coefficient, R², will be zero. We know that y is dependent on x, but isn't linearly dependent.

The coffee in the lobby was only slightly better, but at least the baristas didn’t crash during their OTA updates.

A 10 minute walk away and you’d find the best coffee for at least a couple miles around.

This is not a paid endorsement, it's just insanely good.

Hm, this seems like a standard many-to-many routing problem on a relatively small road network (only Paris). Why would this take several decades? Even if you just implemented a straightforward Dijkstra without any speed-up technique, it should take not more than a minute (you can trivially compute routes from N to M places using N Dijkstra runs).

to do even better, you can compute the shortest path & distance to M kebab shops from the nearest of N train stations using a single run of a standard shortest path algorithm like Dijkstra, by changing the initial condition of the search to start from a set of multiple source nodes, not a single source node.

another way to think about this is to take the graph and augment it with an additional virtual root node and add length 0 edges from that virtual root node to each of the N train stations, then use that virtual root node as the source for a single-source Dijkstra.

alternatively, modify the original graph by merging all the train station nodes together into one node (if this introduces self-loop edges, delete them, if this introduces multi-edges between same pair of nodes, delete all but a minimal length one)

I also rated some of them with 1 star because fast food seemed to have degenerated to "being stuck in waiting line with gigworkers collecting food for other people"-food. Not the best experience when you're on a mission to catch the next train in 15 minutes and they let you wait. @BigFastFoodChain if you read this - Have an extra menu with a category "Super Fast Food" or "Ready & Available in under a minute" that enables people in frequented locations to use their time better. Also goes for supermarkets - add self check-outs!

1) An alarming number of regions in the world have a pizza joint called "New York Pizza", "Manhattan Pizza", or similar.

2) The similarity of the pizza therein to the actual thin, greasy slices served up in pizza joints from actual New York is inversely proportional to the location's distance from New York.

So, the New York Pizza in Boston -- pretty close. The New York Pizza in Brisbane, QLD is alien by comparison and I think they consider "pepperoni" and "salami" interchangeable down there.

It gets even worse south of brisbane in Logan.

We have like, one wholesale supplier of "Halal Beef Pepperoni" and all the non chain pizza shops down here seem to have standardised on it, to appeal to the local religious sensibilities.

Its like eating a damp meat flavoured rag. It has no spice to it.

We have a "Brooklyn Slice" opening up, and they seem to be advertising normal salami. If its spicy at all, it will change the game.

The farther I have to travel to get to the food, the more motivation I’m gonna need. I’ll go pretty far for my favorite Korean food or for my buddy’s favorite doner, but if I’ve got a meeting in 30 minutes then I’m going to the least objectionable of the four closest places. And as easily nerd sniped as I am, let’s be honest that’s happening at least once a week, which is probably more often than I go to the good places.

Anecdotally the worst McDonalds Burger I had was with a cold slice of cheese at the Berlin Main Station, while the Döner there was always above par.

When your falafelshop is in the neighborhood you can't be scamming people because you'll quickly become abandoned.

I recently had some really bad experiences with some fast food places in my corner of the world, at a train station as well.

They all had 4.9 stars but lots of 1 star reviews matching my experience. But also tons and tons of eerily similar 5 star reviews with a generic photo of the counter (no faces, no food) and a random name and glowing review of who "served" them. Which is impossible at those places.

And I also do a quick sort by newest. If all the newest reviews are tourists, I know to steer clear. Tourists will give a convenience store egg sandwich 6 stars out of five. They'll write a full-on essay about the fine experience they had at a restaurant and saying it's obvious the chef put lots of care into the meal, not realizing it's a local chain restaurant that just pops things in the microwave. Then they'll take off 2 stars at a good place because the chef couldn't make them a gluten-free, rice-free, beef-free, soybean-free chicken burger (also, they have deadly poultry allergies so they can only eat chicken substitutes). I also see loads of these types of reviews.

Just basing any kind of research of reviews on the web is fundamentally flawed as only a tiny fraction of customers would ever review a restaurant - and usually reviews are overly biased negative from bad experiences, or biased positive by people being incentivised to leave good reviews by discounts or outright fake reviews, or some kind of average of the two. As such the actual results from these reviews are pretty meaningless, apart from the number of reviews which might correlate roughly with how likely a place is to be visited, good or bad. In this case, I think that will also probably correlate with proximity to stations, rather than the quality.

High mass-transit corridor real-estate (rail, air, road) leases come at a premium so those higher fixed-costs and must be balanced against a higher-volume of less-breadth of service with the same fixed (or even slightly higher) labor costs.

In food service, high-volume is (mostly) inversely correlated with quality.

Reviews are the worse way to test this hypothesis except all the others.

I honestly hate this take, sure, it might be the best (easily available, broad enough thing), but it's not my point, I'm not shutting this down, but giving a remark on what kind of drawbacks should be considered when analysing this, not because it's probably the best you should assume it's perfect.

That's not skew. That accurately reflects "non-native" clients, who are people too.

> a high concentration of americans will typically result in junk food scoring too high

You do realize that America has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants per capita? Way to stereotype

> high scoring asian food in the west tastes nothing like what it should

Are you also going to criticize Japan for not making American BBQ like "what it should"?

You're showing yourself to be extremely prejudiced against all sorts of other nationalities, and against the creative outcomes when nationalities mix. But people have different tastes from whatever you think is "right", and that's OK.

How did you find this data? A quick google says that France has about 630 Michelin restaurants and the US about 230 (and obviously fewer people live in France). It looks like Switzerland has the highest per capita with 143 for about 9 million people. The US has a lot of good eating places, but let's stick to facts.

I'd be interested in seeing the same analysis with other metrics of quality, like the proportion of negative reviews referencing food vs other things (or a wilson-scored version thereof).

I guess the joke is that nowadays you crawl pages by prompting and LLM

Not sure I disagree as a traveler.

Would overpass turbo maybe be a better alternative for finding specifics things depending of multiple clauses geographically?

-quote from Ratatouille

> With a mighty Pearson's correlation of 0.091, the data indicates that this could be true!

This sounds like op thinks the data supports the hypothesis.

One would assume a negative result for the hypothesis would occur when there is a bias in the upper left quadrant, where shortest distance and highest score intersect, and looking at the graphs in figures 8 and 9, to me, there appears a bias there.

In fact, he makes this very observation - high foot traffic areas command higher rents, and it's harder to provide both good quality and good value where rents are high. But restaurants that can be successful without good real estate are a green flag.

Heaven is where the cooks are French, the police are British, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the cooks are British, the police are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.

Don't Google Maps reviews separately measure food, "ambience" and service? Is it not possible to access the food component directly?

It's debatable whether these components can actually be segregated that way. In practice, no, every review system is plagued with reviews in the form of 'delicious food, lovely staff, but another table was too loud one star.'

I'm saying it's difficult if not impossible to disentangle these elements. The vibe, perhaps even the staffs' moods, will be in part a function of the diners. That, in turn, turns at least in part on the food. And vice versa--a place with a devout following that respects the kitchen staff will probably produce better food and ambiance, as both arise out of a sense of mutual respect.

You may not care about the food directly. But if your barmate in a fun outfit with a contagious laugh does, that's part of the vibe you're there to feed on. (I love food. But I've sometimes found myself winnowing down a list of restaurant options by the lighting.)

There can be good food near transportation hubs, but it will be more costly. It is difficult to filter out price as a factor in reviews because people can value their money differently, especially tourists.

I don't mind saying it was the worst kebab I've ever had.

for solving the problem of reviews not representing kebab taste, you can put reviews through the llm and ask it silple question - does it say that kebab is good or bad, or it is not about the taste at all

given then a set of labeled reviews, you can very reliably devise the label you need

you also can widen your top funnel with the approach, as it is agnostic to category, name, etc.

This joke alone was worth the read.

> Whilst there are some minor indications that the hypothesis could be correct (eg. many of the absolute worst restaurants being some of the closest) the correlation is simply too weak.

... I had an ex who was a huge clam chowder fan, so she did her own "experiment" and tried every chowder-serving restaurant on the Santa Cruz wharf (I think there were seven).

Her completely unscientific finding was that the very best chowder was at the end of the wharf, and generally speaking the chowder got worse as you got closer to the start of the pier (ie. the closest place to The Boardwalk ... where all the tourists come).

It makes perfect sense to me: if people come to your restaurant because of its location, you don't put much effort into quality. If you're far from the walk-in traffic, you need to do something (like make really delicious chowder) to get people to walk out to you.

The assumption that I had made was, "More foot traffic = more customers = more reviews = higher overall rating". I was expecting to see a very high score close to train stations, and a hard slope the further you went from stations. My thinking was that location would heavily favor the rating, both in terms of convenience for customers, and in terms of non-Parians eating the food, because they are on vacation, traveling, etc. as the author had mentioned. I figured that if they are in higher spirits, they would leave higher reviews.

After seeing the results, it does make me wonder if this might have still played a role, but to a lesser degree? Hard to say, given how scattered it all is. Botting really does ruin metrics like this.

Personally, I think, it would be interesting to see something like the following in part 2:

1) Distance from station and proximity of kebab shop to bars/nightclubs. Perhaps someone who is drunk, and plans on taking the metro back to a hotel is likely to think a kebab is far better, compared to one who is further away from heavy drinking and further away from transportation. Both of those things being removed would make me think the overall review would be lower, but I think the actual ratings would be far more accurate, and more likely given by Native Parisians (assuming it's by a neighborhood, or whatever.)

2) It would be interesting to see what the impact is, in terms of amount of reviews reviews, the further away a kebab shop is from a station.

For example: If we are to assume that kebab_1 and keba_2 both open within six months of one another, but one is 1km from a station, while the other is almost on the platform, how much will that impact the number of reviews received?

3) Finally, it might also be interesting to hear what other food review websites that might offer this type of information. I assume the French have at least one French-centric social media platform for food reviews, which you can (hopefully) grab data from. How does that sites info compare to Google?

3a) Other nations food review sites might be interesting, too. My understanding is that Iran and Turkey are both very passionate about kebab, I could imagine them have thorough reviews of Parisian kebab shops. I could also see Japan having a pretty passionate food review site, given how crazy the Japanese can get for France, Paris in particular. I.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome

4) Perhaps there would be some interesting datapoints to pull out based on places that have closed permanently. That is, "Is a kebab shop that is close to a station more likely to stay open, or close down?"

I've found some gems by looking for the third category.

Given that "near the train" is a good location, that would support this theory.

Mathematically a trivial example is the equation 1=x+y, where 1 represents some cutoff and could be any value. Clearly x and y are inversely correlated.

- Katz's deli in NYC is incredibly famous, in a great location, and actually has kickass pastrami. The trade-off are relatively high prices and lines down the block

- restaurants with exclusive relationships.

- restaurants that make money another way, e.g. gambling.

- family owned restaurants with legacy rent deals.

- restaurants that cater to niche audiences e.g. small ethnicities and religions

(And others, probably)

The grand parent post clearly stated it is the poster's "rule of thumb". By definition they are aware that the rules are [likely] "not mutually exclusive". Starting with "these are not mutually exclusive", is what makes this comment so unnecessary. Don't be proud of having listed exceptions to someone's rule of thumb.

Had you started with, "I like that; these are a few exceptions I've observed to your rules that I find interesting", that would be a productive way to start a conversation.

But starting with "these are not mutually exclusive" makes you seem like an ass for having pointed at an exception to something that by definition has exceptions.

It's right in the posting guidelines [1.]

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

[1.] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The poster added valuable information, that is interesting and not self-evidently obvious to the average person who doesn't think much about restaurants, that makes the forum more useful to others?

Yeah I'm not a fan but it's orders of magnitude less frustrating than the people that try to take a very lossy rule of thumb with a fat "better safe than sorry" factor baked in and then do mental gymnastics to try and plug all the massive gaps.

ADDED: These days, sure, close to Lower East Side and Orchard Street but that sure wasn't primo real estate a few decades ago (including When Harry Met Sally was filmed).

Cost, Convenience, Quality: Pick 2

This isn't that deep either - convenience and quality are 2 things that cost the restaurant money (either via higher rent, or more expensive ingredients).

You can't do all 3 because you'll never make a profit.

You can't do only 1 or you'll never get any customers.

Two is just right for both buyer and seller.

A broadly accurate guide or principle. If there are enough exceptions that it is not broadly accurate, it's not a good rule of thumb.

> Did you think you were being helpful?

By doing what?

- restaurants that are going to fail but have not done so quite yet

That covers a lot of restaurants. It's a business sector with a lot of churn. Many mediocre establishments hold on for a few years before they close.

Even some slightly fancy restaurants have a corner full of slot machines. They must make a small mint to offset putting off diners.

I know what you are thinking: This guy lives in Nevada. Nope. Illinois.

That last category seems to be growing as well nearby. There are 3 Uzbek restaurants in the neighboring towns. 3! All opened within a year of each other, I think.

1. Good locations are more expensive.

2. People are willing to pay more for better food.

3. Therefore (all else equal), better restaurants earn more revenue.

4. Therefore, better restaurants have a higher willingness-to-pay on rent.

5. Therefore, better restaurants will outbid worse restaurants for good locations.

Sure, there's always exceptions, especially in older cities where the restaurant was established in a great spot a long time ago and is owned by a family. But generally, restaurants have far too low profit margins to remain for long in a top location. And I think all of us know this from experience.

If they know. West Coast bagels have been almost consistently garbage until very, very recently because the people willing to pay up for a great bagel weren't able to pick out those that were freshly boiled. Combine that with the economics of bagels prohibiting boiling and baking to order (hmm...) and you wind up with the necessity of toasting old (but not stale) bagels.

Also, compare any big city to its adjacent areas. Like everyone knows LA has better food than San Bernardino.

it's no different than saying people with higher income, overall, rent/buy housing that costs more.

This varies strongly region to region (and price level). In America and much of Europe, in most cases, yes. (Exception: tier 1 cities.)

In parts of Asia it varies from being almost rule to being a solid way to avoid great food. Put another way, go where the food-obsessed locals go. If the locals are dining at hotel restaurants, go there. If they're avoiding them for street food, do that.

On a parallel note, crappy little hotel bars are something of a delight to visit, particularly in your home town. You get to meet randos seeing your familiar through fresh eyes and for the first tie, and even if you don't meet anyone interesting, the people watching alone is usually paydirt.

Depends on the stakes too: anniversary dinner or grabbing a coffee in a different part of town?

Also, the lowest scoring outliers were the closest proximity, which I think is noteworthy.

I'd be curious about the article's study being re-run with a dummy variable for predominantly commuter versus tourist train stations.

The way I think about it is this: the restaurant has to pay for the real estate, and that cost must get factored in somehow. Water views aren't cheap. So you can get good food on the water, but you'll be paying for the view.

Conversely, I have one piece of life advice for you: Don't eat seafood in Alice Springs.

In my head I have a category for reliable restaurants to go to when you are planning something with people and you want to make sure to have a consistent, predictable experience and restaurants that are worth waiting for or going at a weird time.

Second rule of thumb: if the milkshakes are good, the food will be good - almost never fails me.

Interior was authentic and nice, but the food turned out to be AWFUL, kebab was burnt to ashes, everything food wise was horrible.

When I complained, the cook came back and apologized, and I saw the cook was White American. Not saying all Americans are bad cooks, but in my experience I would have expected turkish chef to cook turkish food for authentic experience and quality.

The best places are mismatched chairs and Formica tabletops, menus left over from the previous occupant with a page of badly translated new menu pasted inside.

(They’ve also clearly spent a lot on the decor, which, again, is normally not a great sign in a restaurant. And yet somehow it’s very good. Against the natural order of things.)

This is actually good. Its a very basic rule of thumb for selecting wine: the more regionally specific they get on the label, the more likely the wine is good.

For example, if you see "California" or "Chile" on a <$10 bottle, expect mediocrity. But if it says "Napa Valley", it'll be a little better, and if it also mentions a location or vineyard, it'll be a lot better.

My pet theory is that this is because the more specific the label gets, the more direct the reputation hit for a bad product.

For France and Italy, wine regions and sub-regions often have protective status. This makes a wine more expensive vs. a non-protected wine of comparative quality, but the upshot is that if you see a wine under a protective label, you can be sure of a certain baseline of quality.

Luckily, those usually go out of business. Un-luckily, you may be a customer first.

Recommendations still matter and some tourists are around for a week or two. I'm highly likely to be a repeat customer at any place that is good.

In my experience finding a good restaurant in a tourist zone is not hugely more difficult than finding a good restaurant elsewhere. The search is easier as a tourist in many ways because the selection is often a limited set.

In San Carlos de Bariloche (highly touristy) I adored Alto El Fuego and I want to go back just for that. Don't try L'Italiano Trattoria: I wanted a bad experience for a masochistic change and I certainly got it. Please gain some pleasure that you've never been there. There's a massive difference between the tastes of local tourists and international tourists.

we used to go a chinese place and we called it "spicy chicken." everything else on the menu was trash

I'm not saying that holds up, only that it's not clear to me that "good location" = skimping on actually being good.

To go the other extreme, I guess all the best restaurants in the USA are in Wyoming since they arguably have worst locations (low population density = low traffic) so they must have to concentrate on food. Yea, ... no.

It's the same as me running a query on Google and copy/pasting a list of 10 results. It doesn't really add anything to a conversation - anyone can go to Google and look something up.

If I'm asking you something it's because I want to discuss it, not because I couldn't be bothered to google it myself. Do people really not realize that?

But judging from the rest of the comments, it seems like most people barely managed to finish reading the title, so perhaps there's no need to worry about them reading this AI slop...

I don’t see any need to mention the "humor" aspect here. Many seemingly laughable hypotheses have turned out to be true when rigorously tested. The author did a good job investigating this one.