NEW YORK -- The Zagat Survey, an innovative Manhattan restaurant guide that turned its critiquing over to customers, is expanding to cover other major cities from coast to coast.
Tim and Nina Zagat, a pair of corporate lawyers looking for a challenge, decided eight years ago to sidestep the usual system by seeking comments from friends who dined out and combining these into a mimeographed report.
It was only a hobby at the start.
But like so many hobbies, the Zagat Survey became too expensive to simply enjoy, costing upwards of $10,000 a year to produce. Instead of dropping the hobby entirely, the Zagats turned it into a business.
'The Survey is really organized word of mouth,' said Zagat, 45, who recently published guides to Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles, with San Francisco in the works.
'Our reviews have the advantage of being based on input from all sorts of people who've collectively eaten hundreds of meals in those restaurants. The people who contribute to the Survey are people I call 'restaurant collectors.' They eat out three, four times a week.'
While the only real criteria for getting involved is the willingness to fill out a long and rather detailed questionnaire, Zagat has 'collected' more than his share of recognizable, if unidentified, restaurant critics.
New York contributors have included historian Arthur Schlesinger and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Washington Mayor Marion Berry offered his opinions for the capital Survey. Playboy president Christy Hefner added her reviews to the Chicago guide, as did Bears head coach Mike Ditka.
Zagat conceded that in today's food-crazy world, there might seem no need for another collection of restaurant reviews, especially in media-overkill cities like New York.
It precisely because diners are subjected to too many opinions from too many long-winded professional food critics that Zagat sees a need for his kind of book.
'When you're trying to decide what restaurant to go to, you don't want to plow through a long, drawn-out essay,' he said.
The whole idea of the Survey was born in Paris in the 1960s, when the Zagats found themselves entertaining out a great deal as part of a job with the French branch of a Wall Street law firm.
The Zagats started keeping a checklist of restaurants they tried, complete with pluses and minuses involving food, atmosphere, service and anything else that affected the total dining experience.
Before long, even as Americans in Paris, they found themselves besieged with requests for photocopies of their list.
Back in New York in the early 1970s, they turned their Paris edition into a compact and casual assessment of 75 restaurants. When the number of anonymous reviewers grew to 400 and the number of copies grew to 5,000, the Zagats stopped giving it away.
The latest 128-page, oxblood red New York guide covers more than 700 restaurants. Its scope is broadened even farther by the Zagats' new 'Survey of New York City Food Sources,' rating wine stores to caterers, spice shops to bakeries.
The Washington Survey brings together the dining experiences of 787 of the capital's most discerning -- senior government officials, members of Congress, business executives, journalists, diplomats, even members of food and wine societies.
Perhaps because of the spread-out nature of Los Angles, the guide for that area made use of 1,400 diners resulting in entries on 370 restaurants, from the finest hotel dining room in Bel Air to the trendiest nouvelle California outlet in Santa Monica.
One element that continually draws laudatory comments is the Zagat's cross-indexing. This complex series of lists helps diners find not only restaurants serving certain kinds of food but in certain kinds of atmosphere and at certain times of the day or night.
Recommendations are included for places good for small children, sidewalk cafes, people-watching, power scenes -- even the best restaurant for dining in a wheelchair.
Not surprisingly, the whole Survey business relies heavily on a computer. The endless combining of all those questionnaires, the references and cross references would chew away at the sanity of anyone trying to handle the job manually.
Yet the finished product is anything but automated in tone. Some entries even included disagreements, when lively opinions came in pro and con about the same restaurant. The result is lively and, according to Zagat, more accurate than any single critic's evaluation.
'We have no equivalent of the Michelin Red Guides,' said Zagat, referring to the most revered critical collection in Europe. 'Moreover, we can be more reliable than Michelin. 'They have a small number of traveling critics, where we have hundreds in each city.'
