Any restaurant with a 20-page menu of every possible cuisine on the planet, you should stay away from.
runs
Never again.
(if you know what I mean)
I do like Cheesecake Factory chicken and biscuits though.
If you make it to Buenos Aires I'll take you up on that!
Why does your analysis assume fixed utility for sites? I expect it is strongly conditioned on recent days, at minimum?
As for frequency, I think that might have more to do with variety and familiarity than quality. Surely, even if you agree that Tim Horton and McDonalds have equally terrible food and you hate it, you'd be more willing to be condemned to eat, each day at your choice that day of either of the two, than to be condemned to eat every day at just one of them, chosen today for all time. But that clearly doesn't mean that the union of Tim Horton and McDonalds has food that is less terrible than either of the two, which would be contradictory.
(You could of course have a scale of restaurant variety rather than quality, and in that case surely a PizzaHutTacoBell would rate higher than either a PizzaHut or a Taco Bell. But that's surely not the kind of rating we're talking about here—is it?)
> (You could of course have a scale of restaurant variety rather than quality, and in that case surely a PizzaHutTacoBell would rate higher than either a PizzaHut or a Taco Bell. But that's surely not the kind of rating we're talking about here—is it?)
You seem to be making a fairly strong argument and then confidently drawing a conclusion that is the opposite of the one the argument suggests. The value of food is determined at the most fundamental, objective level by what else you've eaten recently. If you are short on something, your perception of taste will change so that the nutrient you are short on tastes better. What's the argument for variety not being a part of food quality?
I was attempting to separate out the "variety" aspect, which as you say cannot be evaluated in isolation and thus makes no sense to print in a guide, by proposing long time scales. Would you really argue that nothing is left once you factor out variety?
> [Do you really think t]hat the whole idea of Michelin stars is entirely nonsense?
I think the perspective some other comments have taken, that there's more to food quality than whether you like it, is entirely nonsense. I don't think the concept of rating is nonsense; everyone likes some things more than other things. But I think your attempt to interpret restaurant ratings doesn't look very good.
> That food quality reduces entirely to variety?
No. But I'm happy to state that the union of Tim Horton's menu with McDonalds' is superior to either alone.
Well, it's too bad it doesn't suit your purposes. I hope you find an interpretation you like better!
> There's nothing about a 1-10 scale that implies that every visit to the restaurant will be equally pleasurable.
You might have to stretch out the time scale a bit to reach stability, as I suggested in my initial comment: would you rather eat at the Cheesecake Factory once a month than Poppy once every two years, but rather eat at Poppy once a year than at the Cheesecake Factory once a month? (I never went to Poppy; maybe you didn't either.)
Maybe there's no time scale at which those numbers stabilize for you, though, so maybe whether you'd rate Tim Horton higher or lower than the Cheesecake Factory depends on how often you've suffered through their ham and cheese croissants in the last month or year. In that case maybe we have doomed the entire project of rating restaurants on a scalar scale, even a purely ordinal scale like the Mohs scale.
If quadratic, then the Cheesecake Factory experience gives you 9 "utils" and Poppy gives you 100 utils. You'd rather eat at Poppy once a month than Cheesecake Factory 11 times a month, but you'd rather eat at Cheesecake factory 12 times a month than either. (If 12 times a month is too much, swap these for per-year numbers.)
If linear, then Cheesecake Factory gives you 3 utils and Poppy gives you 10. You'd rather eat at Poppy once a month than Cheesecake Factory 3 times a month, but you'd rather eat at Cheesecake Factory 4 times a month than either.
If logarithmic, it doesn't really matter what the base of the logarithm is. Suppose it's 10. Then Cheesecake Factory gives you 0.477 utils and Poppy gives you 1 util. You'd rather eat at Poppy once a month than Cheesecake Factory twice a month, but you'd rather eat at Cheesecake Factory three times a month. I think this is roughly how my restaurant scale works.
If exponential, it does matter what the base of the exponential is. Suppose it's 10. Then Cheesecake Factory gives you 1000 utils and Poppy gives you 10 billion utils. You'd rather eat at Poppy once in your life than Cheesecake Factory an unlimited number of times (once a week for 200,000 years). But if the base of the exponential is 2, then we're talking about 8 Cheesecake Factory utils versus 1024 Poppy utils. In that case you'd rather eat at Poppy once every 4 years than at Cheesecake Factory once a week, but you'd rather eat at Cheesecake Factory (or an equivalently good restaurant) once a week than at Poppy every 5 years.
So, how does that 1-10 scale map to your preferences?