Hi there, "OP" here.
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....
Why did you include metro stations in your study? The original quote only included train stations. The metro originally largely replaced a tram network, so the metro station density in Paris is higher than for other underground systems. I think it is very hard to find kebap shops in Paris that are not within 500 m of a metro station. This kind of dilutes the significance of your study, because I never really noticed that metro stations had a negative impact on their surrounding area (the opposite, really).
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.
I would second this. In Paris, but I find it to be true in most European city, the area surrounding train station is usually not very nice. It is usually surrounded by cheap hotel for 1-night traveler, overpriced fast food (hence the initial theory) and social housing / cheap building (a lot of people don't want to live next to a train station due to the nuisance, so poor people often get stuck there).
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.
As a non-Parisian: the hard distinction between "metro" and "train" can be non-obvious, even perplexing, depending on which train systems one is accustomed with. Some systems just don't have it, in manners that if said in Paris terms it might be train to Lyon arriving next to Line 6 Westbound.
It doesn't need to be a hard distinction. I'm sure everyone can see the difference of a building with multiple platforms and usually shops and other things targetting non-locally-resident travellers and your average metro stop with has two platforms (one for each direction) and not much more than an entrance and exit. Where exactly you draw the line doesn't really matter.
That. That kind of distinction isn't universal. Some places just have a fused metro-plus-train system, in which you can slip in a $1 metro ticket, ride along changing metro trains for over a day across >1500km/1000mi, and pay outstanding fee at the exit, like on Japanese JR networks and metro trains interoperating with it.
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.
There is usually a difference between a "local network" to travel within a metropolitan area and "intercity" train to go from one big city to another.
That is what matters here.
>As a non-Parisian: the hard distinction between "metro" and "train" can be non-obvious
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.
Yeah, as a piece of knowledge, and what I've been saying is it's European thing.
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.
Train has a train station (with paid toilets now unfortunately in France) and connects to other parts of the country. Metro is a subway and is within city boundaries
You would need to further filter for the largest railway stations, perhaps by number of platforms ≥ 6 or 8, otherwise you will include many urban and suburban stations that serve essentially the same purpose as metro stations.
There are not a lot of stations that a Parisian dweller would consider to be a "railway station" AND "inside Paris".
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.
For those wondering the original image was speaking of "Gare" which are well-defined: https://www.sncf-connect.com/gares/paris
And Saint-Lazare, the third busiest train station in France based on the number of daily travellers, and the oldest in Paris.
Ah you're right! I don't know why I forgot Saint-Lazare.
I checked the link in the sibling comment[0] and just found out that "Gare Paris Bercy Bourgogne - Pays d'Auvergne" is a thing that exists. Never heard of it before.
So all in all, from a Frenchperson's perspective there are 7 "gares" (train stations) in Paris.
I’d go with if it isn’t Gare «something» then it doesn’t count.
This is such a dystopian phenomenon, I'm far from an expert but I guess it's a matter of city planning?
It's very hard to avoid this. It's mostly a combination of railway noise, throughput of a large number of people who are only travelling through, opportunities for pickpockets and beggars, and historically of soot and air pollution by steam engines, which makes these areas unattractive to live in.
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.
It's also a very large building or roofed space, where it's more difficult than elsewhere to accuse homeless etc of loitering.
It is difficult to avoid, as metro passengers are mainly residents or workers in nearby premises. Station halls are also much bigger and attract the marginalised who want to shelter from the elements.
I thought to include metro stations mostly because of the nature of the original French subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/MetroFrance/comments/1hcifh1/pas_vu...). It perhaps doesn't make much sense in hindsight, but I also filtered out metro stations later on in the post and it didn't change much.
I'm starting work on a follow-up which will sample more cities, though I still plan to use walking distances w network analysis for now.
Hey, Not sure what you were left with once you removed metro stations but in the context of the original image the "gare" would be: https://www.sncf-connect.com/gares/paris .
And people would probably often forget Paris Bercy ^^.
Seconded. Train stations are important attractors for some kinds of people and some kinds of eating place, metro stations (particularly relatively small and uniformly distributed ones, as is the case in Paris) are only able to give a restaurant an easily reachable position, only for metro travellers, compared to others in the neighbourhood. Different effects, good for a different study.
Paris is a special case - you've got a great metro and everywhere is close to a station :)
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.
That looks like a typical collider bias to me... There should be no correlation between location and quality... But as you are looking at restaurant that are still "in business" you are introducing a bias. If you simplify, a restaurant can have : - good/bad location - good/bad food
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.
> 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).
--
The correlation is still there, but it's a reason the causation you might have been thinking plausible might not be.
In OP's case, however, the correlation did NOT seem to exist.
I just want to tell you that it's very well written, well done!
> 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)
> I suppose I need to start working on part 2....
I'll wait for the ignobel paper.
I’d love to see more spatial sql applied. As a side effect tbh your code may get shorter. Even though R and Python are type go-to langs for ML, it is SQL which excels at spatial analysis.
Which R-Tree Rust library were you referring to?
https://github.com/georust/rstar
Banger library. Not sure how it compares to, say, kd-tree in terms of performance but it allows for plenty of primitives.
Try fitting something non-linear or simply plot a mean (or median) rating over distance with some smoothing.
please do berlin, london, and stockholm.
Yeah, this is a nice selection of European cities to compare!
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.
Kebabs are one of the foods (like Chinese cuisine) that morphs depending on a combination of which kebab-eating group brought it to the country, and local cuisine.
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.
The author is Swedish, and having asked some Swedes they basically consider the kebab to be the goto "local" cuisine.
London of course has the two styles, |Turkish| and Turkish via Germany.
Kebabs in Australia are basically a different food to the one you get in continental Europe.
Good, but different.
Berlin shouldn't be a surprise, because the Kebap Sandwich was invented here (at least according to some sources: https://berlinexperiences.com/was-the-doner-kebab-invented-i...)
Before that, Kebap was a dish served on a plate, taken in a seated manner.
The article itself gives a negative verdict on this:
Verdict
NO
The Döner Kebab was not invented in Berlin.
Popularised here? Ok.
But there are no participation trophies for that.
I don't understand how it was popularised there though. It's a staple in France and seems to have no connection to Germany
Doner kebap was invented in Ottoman empire in 19th century. It was also usually eaten inside bread.
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)
This is plainly false. Doner was being served in both sandwich and wrapped forms in Turkey well before the 70's. It was one of my grandfather's favorite foods growing up in Ankara in the 40's, and I've got family photos with street vendors selling it on the streets of Istanbul in the 60s.
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.
As someone whose been living in Berlin for the last 11 years I'm always horrified to read people say they wish the had high quality kebabs "like in Berlin" - the average kebab here is atrocious (obviously optimized for price and not for quality) - the best ones are OK but definitely not amazing.
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.
As someone who moved out of Berlin a year and a half ago — you truly do not want to find out how other people live.
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.
Well, technically I did say "has best options", not "the kebab quality median is great".
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.
"Least disappointing experience" is how I would put the better kebab places in Berlin! Shawarma in Tel Aviv is not exactly the same but similar and so much better (of course there's a lot of variability in quality there too, and it costs something like 2-3x as much as kebabs in Berlin).
I'm sure you can also get amazing specimen in Arab countries and in Turkey (I don't have first hand experience there).
Ok but I was talking about European cities, and Döner Kebab. You're comparing it to a different dish as made in a country from the Arabian peninsula. It's fine to say that the latter is the better food but it makes no sense in the context of arguing where to get the best kebab in Europe.
I'm not arguing about where to get the best döner kebab in Europe. Just saying it's sad that the best we can get is this mediocre.
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."
As someone who spends a lot of time travelling, I'd rank Istanbul to have the best döner in the world. You find alright stuff in Germany, acceptable options in the rest of Europe, and I've never failed to be disappointed by döner in the US (which is a shame, because I keep trying it because it's a top 10 good for me)
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.
Yeah I can't really tell why it's so challenging to find good levantine and Middle Eastern food in Europe (even in places with lots of Turkish and Arab immigrants). Turkish döner vs Arab shawarma is more of a matter of taste (the döner is fattier and the dairy based sauces make it even fattier which is not to my taste but is not objectively bad thing) but I don't get what's so hard it making it that you can't get good results outside its homelands.
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.
LOL we may need to update the title of this post, half the top level comments right now are assuming the study confirmed the hypothesis.
> 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.
> 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?
> with a google review lower than 3 stars
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?
I expect this guy to keep it fresh for me.
I don't know if you're joking or not but in case you're not, you can't really keep fries "fresh". Regardless, the point remains that the quality of third party food delivery services shouldn't be considered when studying the quality of restaurants.
I always open fries. They will get cold. Fine. Cold fries can be reheated; they won’t be as good as fresh, but soggy fries are much harder to fix.
I agree. Nothing is worse than receiving fries which have been in a closed or semi-closed container and have been soaking in their own steam.
> 2. All those "bad kebabs" actually located within 500m from the nearest station. No kebab located in further than >500m is bad.
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.
This "you have to choose D" ahead of time nonsense is why people distrust and dislike statisticians! Humans have priors on what is "close" that are independent of this particular article. If they had said "See, everything within 5000m" or "everything within 5m" you might have a point but "500m" being a rough definition of "close to a train station" is pretty reasonable.
> If they had said "See, everything within 5000m" or "everything within 5m" you might have a point
On the contrary, if everything was within five meters, that would make the finding much more impressive.
Bad kebab shops may survive if located near a train station.
The more generally interesting a topic is the more likely a HN user is to read the article. A study.
I am definitely guilty of sometimes clicking "reply" and then reading the linked article to check that I'm not about to essentially tell you what you'd have read or worse, tell you something the article actually debunks.
I only read articles with headlines that describe informative content, not with headlines that sound funny or thought-provoking.
Heh. You've just captured the reason why (the better) clinical journals explicitly and specifically forbid having a statement of results in the title of a paper.
Would it help if I were to chime in with a response about the benefits of kebab case over train case?
Hi there, inventor of the kebab plugin for traindeck here. I'm afraid I was the one who introduced the concept of kebab case, way back in the early 1990s. Back then, trains didn't have enough processing power to handle full cuts of meat, so I thought I'd introduce kebabs as a hack, and it ended up taking off! Didn't expect anyone to still be using it. It's always fun to share stories on HN - you never know who you'll meat here.
Easy fix: just add a ? to the end.
"study" is already in scare quotes
Ha ha I had my coding eyes on. I removed the quotes mentally as the entire title starts with one.
Here in Berlin there are an enormous amount of kebab places (thousands). Basically, most places are embedded in neighborhoods and have a crowd of locals that go there. The quality varies wildly as a lot of these places are obviously aimed at the money laundering business (cash only) rather than serving food. Poor hygiene, indifferent service, etc. Many of these places are completely pointless from a business point of view. Other than the money laundering thing. They are easy to recognize since they look kind of old and dirty and there are usually not a lot of customers. If it's lunch/dinner time and nobody is eating, maybe skip it.
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).
Pardon my ignorance, but I always wonder how these money laundering kebab places work. We have some in my city too and they always leave me puzzled. If nobody eats there, how do they launder money? I'm probably daft/naieve but can't figure out the mechanics of money laundering when the business doesn't actually move any product.
The point is generally to recover cents on the dollar from money you can't otherwise use. Imagine you have a network of people moving illegal drugs. They collect money from their customers, and they need to pay it to you, the supplier. Arrange for them to eat a lot of food at your restaurant. Maybe they shout their friends. The money goes into the restaurant, and is mingled with other money. That money is used to pay costs for the business, but some of it is still profit. That profit, while less than the illegal input money, is _clean_ money, which is much more valuable because you can spend it without fear generally.
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.
You don’t need them to eat kebab. Just put on your books that you sold a lot of kebab. Do it in cash. Buy some meat and throw it out if you want, and you’re fine.
they only throw out the meat on the books: mark it as unsellable and deduct it as shrink.
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.
Yeah that's how it's done. The other comments are overcomplicating it.
> 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.
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?
You are overthinking all this. This is not Al Capone investigation, tax offices are understaffed and petty negligence or even crime happens with tax returns very frequently. 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? Not sure if casinos even keep all video feeds for say 3 years since it takes time to actually file and process those tax returns.
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 can say whatever you want if you assume you can't be audited. In that case there's no reason to play the slots at all. Your money will stay just as dirty in either case, but you'll have 30% more of it.
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.
Hell, even someone like Dan Bilzerian basically openly laundered tens of millions via “private poker games” and he’s never going to be charged for it.
Yep. A classic movement (at least on Spain) is buying winning lottery tickets.
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...
If you play long enough, you always lose all of your money.
A bunch of computer games have had very restrictive rules about getting money back out of the game that other people have put in.
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).
<cough> Counterstrike skins and gambling websites <cough>
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.
Requiring your henchmen to eat a lot of Kebab all the time is not at all a scalable money laundering scheme. It's also self-defeating since they will become fat and sickly from too much Kebab :-(
The more common thing that comes up in hypothetical conversations of the sort “you acquire $5M through less than legal means. How can you spend it?” is owning a bar.
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.
While on holiday in South America, I visited a friend and we went out for drinks quite a few times, we visited different neighborhoods and at times I was really puzzled as to why this very "new" looking, gigantic, fully staffed bars were often completely empty, he clarified that those were likely laundering drug money.
Well, let it never be said that South and Central American cartels aren’t ballsy af.
The house is also part of the crime? As in, loosing is part of the money transfer plan?
> If nobody eats there, how do they launder money?
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!
You have money you can't explain to the IRS how you got it, that's dirty money. Now you use some clean money to buy a kebab shop. Every day you give your dirty money to the kebab shop, the kebab shop prints fake receipts. Now the IRS can be convinced the money came from cash in hand customers.
Does the IRS somewhat encourage dirty money to be taxed? I'm guessing they would prefer to have it highly taxed but perhaps getting some tax is second best.
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.
Well yes, in the sense that Al Capone famously got nailed on not filing income taxes. But of course, if Al Capone had told the IRS that he got his money through extortion and illegal liquor, gambling and drugs or whatever it was he did then the IRS would gladly give that information to whoever was investigating him, so I don't think the IRS would profit much from it either way.
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.
Just to be clear, it has been the law of the land that IRS is not allowed to share this information with criminal investigation. They realized how badly they screwed their revenue collection by “getting” Al Capone. To be clear, Tony Soprano files his taxes. It’s generally the smaller henchmen who don’t.
They already have the money, they just need a business as a facade to claim the money was earned by running the business. But you are right, eventually it would be suspicious if they only sold food but never bought the matching raw ingredients. That's probably why they now moved to barber shops - nobody knows or can prove you didn't cut the hair of the hundreds of people that were never there.
Hmmm. Maybe that’s why hairdressers are on the skilled worker list for immigration to Australia.
They pretend like people _do_ eat there, that's how the dirty cash ends up in the register.
As an example of something similar happening, my family and I once went to a little village in the middle of Bulgaria to visit a family fried, and booked a hotel room for the week. This was a huge hotel, next door to another huge hotel, serving a village with a population of a few hundred people.
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.
Although no one eats there, he declares 50 kebab sales, the purchase of a frozen kebab skewer and bread rolls, etc. The raw materials will either be thrown away or sold on to another real restaurant. But to pass the checks, the purchases of raw materials must be consistent with the sales. The 50 sales are made with cash from drug trafficking. The simpler the activity, the fewer raw materials and the bigger the margins, the better. Amsterdam has its Nutella waffle stands, Berlin its kebabs, Paris its nail bars and massage parlours.
Ireland and the UK have Vape Shops, Mattress Stores, Internet Cafes, Sunbed Salons, Phone Repair Shops, and increasingly 'US Sweet Shops' for some reason (presumably high margin, low price shelf-stable inventory, no significant food safety or service regs for ambient goods storage, can be run by minimum wage staff.)
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/uk/2024/05/08/londons-plagu...
We can add the oriental carpet dealers to the list. I have a friend who lives next to one of these shops. He has never seen a single customer in 5 years and the prices displayed are just crazy. The shop goes bankrupt or changes owner every one to two years in order to complicate the financial controls, but it's always the same people inside.
The whole think must be a facade to justify rental income and declared jobs.
I think there is some exaggeration
> 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.
All cash transactions with essentially no/sloppy bookkeeping. Receipts optional. Money goes in, taxes are declared but it doesn't necessarily all add up. So they mix in some non clean revenue and it all comes out as income.
Pretty sure it’s mostly for tax dodging than money laundering. Less risky too
He didn't find a correlation, or rather found that there is no correlation, between proximity to a railway station and how the kebab is reviewed. It's a nice study for a statistics class!
There may not be a correlation, but you can clearly see that the bottom-right quadrant of the plot is basically empty, which is an important insight.
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.
> but you can clearly see that the bottom-right quadrant of the plot is basically empty, which is an important insight.
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.
> Long after other kebab places are dark they're still doing enough business to justify remaining open.
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.
The KFC next to them shuts long before they do. The nearest McDonalds (a drive through) is 24/7 but I've been there late at night and it's extremely quiet. Moreover neither sells kebabs, whereas plenty of places which do sell kebabs in this part of the city close earlier.
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.
> but the way you can tell it's the best place for a kebab is how late it's open every night
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.
Late is a tradeoff. On resteraunt can make a killing serving anyone out but there are not many so two staying open late both go bankrupt from lack of business. Or maybe the area can support two (3? 10?) I don't know the real number but not as many as the daytime lunch crowd.
I miss Sparky’s.
[dead]
> "You can sell good kebabs anywhere, but you can only sell bad kebabs near a train station."
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?
>Do drunk french people buy kebabs?
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.
Wonder whether that's an instance of Berkson's paradox.
Basically nobody bothering to report about Kebab shops that are neither good nor conveniently located. Probably not, but "one quadrant empty" is a handy red flag that you might encounter Berkson's.
As far as I can tell, his study is looking for a correlation with the distance to Metro stations.
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.
The original data includes "train and metro stations", but figure 9 filtered the data to only include train stations and arrived at the same conclusion.
At the end of article it's shown that only considering train stations didn't really change the result.
That saying in France is usually understood to be for cities outside of Paris and only referring to "Gares" (that word is used for train stations, not for subway stations). Anecdotally, I'd say it holds true in general in most cities I've visited (with Paris being an exception)
Pedantic nitpick: he didn't find a linear correlation.
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.
Always like reading the Best Kebab reviews on trip advisor. It’s right next to Queen Street railway station so fits with the study.
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g186534-d125...
> Not only was my food uncooked but I also discovered a pubic hair in my chips and cheese, then when I proceeded to report the problem, I was chased with a knife. Down Dundas Street.Absolutely scandalous
For context: "Knifey Chaseies" is an historic pastime in Glasgow where this shop is located. An immigrant flare to a local tradition!
Haa so many memories passing this kebab at the end of the night. I confirm it is the worst I ever tasted, but chips were Ok
In a similar vein, in Venice I developed this theory that you could estimate your distance to San Marco by the price of a slice of pizza (more expensive meaning closer). Never tested it, but would be fun to see a heatmap.
Anecdotally, it's the same for coffee. Office lobby coffee shops are invariably terrible. The decent ones are always at least a 5-10 minute walk away.
The coffee from the machine in the office is even worse.
The last office I worked in not only had terrible coffee, but the machine had a touch screen and required network connectivity and regularly crashed, prohibiting all dispensation of coffee. It also reportedly came with a 5 figure monthly operating cost.
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.
Visit us. You'll be surprised. :D
Now find the correlation to the quality of coffee to how recent the latest funding round was.
We buy our own coffee and equipment. The quality is constant. The only variable is our mood, which might affect the measurement from jug to jug, resulting in slight taste variations.
OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
OP failed to reject the null hypothesis of no correlation at the given power level.
Sometimes in another office building's lobby.
Looking at their actual results (https://preview.redd.it/znmnejgab5je1.png?width=1000&format=...), I don't see any positive or negative correlation. Although I can subjectively confirm the hypothesis.
For an exception, Kebapland in Ehrenfeld, Cologne is in the shadow of the mainline rails to Aachen and on top of the Ehrenfeld U-Bahn. It has the hands-down best kebap (and euro-for-euro meal) found in Köln.
This is not a paid endorsement, it's just insanely good.
I've observed the following:
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.
> I think they consider "pepperoni" and "salami"
Mate, spicy snags are spicy snags
Edit: Used the actual aussie word for sausages...
While the work provides some additional data, it does little more than re-propose an already-common hypothesis — that pizza which is closer in distance is also closer in flavor. The author is searching for the minimum publishable unit, and misses even that mark. I advise against publishing.
>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.
To be fair, pepperoni is literally just spicy salami. Salami with hot peppers added. Hence the "pepper" in the name.
> Hence the "pepper" in the name.
Pepperomi doesn't quite have the same ring to it
I've heard that the farther you go from Italy, the more adventurous ingredients you can find on a pizza.
I used to live in New Zealand.
we must invade italy and show them the true enlightenment that is pineapple on pizza
> I could've absolutely just routed to every single entrance for every single restaurant to get the nearest... But that would've taken several decades.
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).
> 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)
kinda related, there is this guy in Berlin who reviews all the kebab places closest to each subway station https://www.youtube.com/@CanF.Kennedy
One sub-hypothesis to add: people getting off the train are more hungry than general population + hungry people generally give more favourable reviews :-)
Finally - this was long term observation I conducted in many cities so far (Check Utrecht, The Hague, Valencia, Frankfurt- often the case you have <4 star kebab shops right next to train station) . If not true for kebab on broader scale, it surely is for McDonalds / Burger King: They use their position / monopoly, no coupons accepted, higher prices - and in some cases not even a seating area. A true real life dark pattern right there.
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!
Running the analysis while adjusting for station size/passenger volume would be interesting: Paris's transit network is very dense and remarkably uniform, so you'd expect a somewhat uniform distribution of quality around train station entrances/exits as a whole. Meanwhile, anecdotally, some of the worst döner I've had in my life was in large/intercity train terminals.
My expectation would be it's the passenger type - if 80% of the people pass through the station never to return, you're going to get quite a different setup than if 80% are daily commuters.
Yeah, good phrasing -- I was treating volume as a proxy for visiting passengers vs. regulars, but that's not correct in all cases.
Or intuitively: who doesn't lower their standards when they buy a meal at an airport or major train terminal? We all do!
Duh, commuters are just less picky with their food choices, reliably fast service trumps food quality here for obvious reasons. Tourists as mentioned in the article are not that many.
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.
Not just commuters but tourists, people you can scam once and who will never be back.
When your falafelshop is in the neighborhood you can't be scamming people because you'll quickly become abandoned.
I have a hypothesis that "popular" restaurants in tourist heavy cities like Paris, London, Tokyo have google reviews are heavily skewed by these tourists. Basically any place that has over 1-2k reviews and 4.5+ becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. Sometimes you go into a supposedly local place and everyone seated around you is American. I tend avoid places with thousands of reviews therefore or when there are barely any reviews in the local language
OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
The point is, that quality is not the metric here; the metric is google ratings. I would take a place with a solid 4.6 but hundreds of ratings over a low double digit 4.9 any time.
Even Google ratings are sometimes gamed nowadays. This wasn't always the case, they used to be reliable. Tripadvisor ratings on the other hand were always garbage.
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.
I'm never going to look at ratings. The only use there is photos of menus, food, and the restaurant itself.
I sort ratings by worst but look at the reason. If the 1 stars are "the waitress was rude", then that's fine. I'm there to eat. I don't need them to flatter me. If the 1 stars are "the food smelled foul and I saw them mixing leftover soup back into the pot", I know to avoid it. I've seen both of these types a lot.
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.
I've seen this too, a lot of 1-star reviews from customers who wanted some substitution and didn't get it. Seems designed to be abused by unreasonable customers, cause one of those equates to ~3 honest customers saying "meh" with a 3-star review. I'd prefer the restaurant that doesn't have to charge extra to absorb the costs of avoiding that.
Döner in Berlin is like ramen in Tokyo: the competition is so furious that objectively bad places go out of business quickly.
There are a few that are obviously some sort of front business. It can't be the Döner.
This makes intuitive sense.
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.
OP found no correlation
Reviews probably have too much noise. It's not only the food that gets rated and people taking the time to rate a place might be doing so because of a particularly good or bad experience they just had. It's not really a day to day thing.
Reviews have a lot of noise, but it feels like it’s still the best source, unless anyone can recommend a better alternative.
Reviews are the worse way to test this hypothesis except all the others.
> Reviews have a lot of noise, but it feels like it’s still the best source, unless anyone can recommend a better alternative.
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.
Not true -- restaurant reviews have a lot of signal. Generally an average score is quite reliable once you hit 100 or so reviews. Even 50 reviews is a pretty decent signal.
Maybe, I've heard statisticians say that 30 samples the mean is pretty much unlikely to change, but that's not the issue here, but that what we are measuring goes beyond food quality and gets skewed towards experiences
not always... the data is skewed by non natives, e.g. a high concentration of americans will typically result in junk food scoring too high, high scoring asian food in the west tastes nothing like what it should, for authentic tastes the scores will be quite mid
> the data is skewed by non natives
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.
>You do realize that America has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants per capita? Way to stereotype
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.
Then OP shouldn't have used that title. My reasoning still stands.
I was hoping for a systematic and consistent reviews of many dozens of kebab shops in a certain metropolitan area.
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.
A stronger hypothesis to test might be the statement: "the closest kebab to the station is worse than the next farther one", which would be the intuitive implied meaning of the original statement (even though it's not a perfectly accurate interpretation).
TFA mentioned several ways in which Google reviews aren't an ideal tool here. Tossing out a couple more, you (1) don't have the same people giving reviews at each location, and (2) have a bias in those who choose to give reviews. As a point of anecdata about (1): Saturne in Paris (now closed) served some of the best food I've ever eaten, and it had lower ratings than a tourist-trap fish place on a pier near to where I live, even if you filter the reviews to only those describing the food.
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).
There is also a bias in the rating range of a city. E.g. in Berlin when looking to go out to eat I'd look for 4.5 and above as it uses quite a wide range for ratings, while e.g. in Rome most time I'd be happy with a 4.0. There are many phenomena (in Rome probably high tourist expectations) that can skew the distribution of reviews in a way that makes it hard to use as a "quality" scale.
It's extremely funny that this is accurate for souvlaki in Greece. :) On the contrary, I was amazed by the quality of food in stations in Japan. Some "shady" shops there had some of the best ramen/udon I had in Japan.
This seems like a clear case of survivor bias. When you’re near commuters and infrequent visitors, accessibility is a quality all of its own. As long as you don’t become infamous, you’re gonna get traffic.
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.
It's case old saying lost it's relevance. This is absolutely correct in developing countries which only has one main railway station or bus stand for the whole city or town. These establishments targeted one time customer who will never return in a year. Including metro is not valid or violation of the actual circumstance this saying originated. Including Mtro and even if still counting walkable distance of 100 m from the station almost covers the whole city. Doing this in Paris with more strict enforcement of food safety and quality isn't really going to validate.
I think it's clear from the plots, that the closer you are to a train station, the more bad kebab shops you will find. That's why it's easy for humans to make the original assumption.
Has anyone tried Le Train Bleu inside Gare de Lyon station in Paris? It's a very fancy restaurant (French, obviously). Like many such places, the reviews are mixed, but it was plenty to impress my simpleton American expectations. Certainly a step up from the options one might find in Penn Station (at least to me)!
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g187147-d11097...
I'm not sure there's a lot of interest in the US for fancy dining in transportation hubs. In fact, airports have generally moved away from fancier dining generally towards fast casual. There is some decent food in the new Moynihan train hall in Penn but certainly no fancy dining.
Not sure I disagree as a traveler.
Seems like a lot of this could be explained by better food tending to be served in locations with lower commercial real estate prices (I believe Tyler Cowen has written about this).
I have a similar theory for restaurants at prime tourist location, the closer it is, the worse the food and service are.
And it kind of makes sense, as:
1) The real state is obviously more expensive, so little money left for the rest
2) The traffic is given, people walk in even if the place is on fire, so no pull is needed
I think a good test for this would be lookin at michelin star restaurants (better than gmaps)
"The best food in the world is made in France. The best food in France is made in Paris. And the best food in Paris, some say, is made by Chef Auguste Gusteau"
-quote from Ratatouille
> not in the mood to build a web scraper (it has the same soul-sucking effect on me as prompting an LLM)
I guess the joke is that nowadays you crawl pages by prompting and LLM
Was confused about this part the last time I saw this posted online:
> 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.
This immediately reminds me of Tyler Cowen's book "An Economist Gets Lunch". He infers all sort of rules for profiling restaurant quality.
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.
OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
You're doing important work throughout this thread. Thanks.
On a slightly related note, what’s with the terrible quality kebabs in the UK? You go to Germany and it’s almost a completely different food.
The ancient joke springs to mind.
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.
And Canada is a place with American cuisine, French government and British technology.
I don't know, I've lived here for a long time and I've been wondering this too. It's like the entire country has been brainwashed long time ago to call these blobs of minced meat that get shaved into skin-like strips kebab - every chippy in the country is guilty of this monstrosity. I'm glad some companies are now starting to appear that make a dent in this, I am forever thankful for a branch of GDK that opened in my city because that's literally the only place that doesn't serve this carboard imitation of a kebab, but yeah I don't get it. People just say "mate it's mint after a night out" - yeah, and so is the real thing???
At least where I live in the UK, kebabs are treated as drunk food, not lunch food. This is completely different to the US where a gyro is treated as a lunch food and always seemed higher quality.
My favorite German food is Turkish. My favorite British food is Lebanese.
Besides the other mentioned issues, using average user rating as a proxy of quality is something that needs at least an argument why you expect the ratings to be comparable. Consider that for example shops near a train station will see a lot more one-off customers who might be inclined to rate differently compared to the shop's neighbors.
>There are many aspects of the dining experience that could hypothetically impact a review score. The staff, cleanliness, the surrounding environment, etc. Not to mention online skulduggery and review manipulation.
Don't Google Maps reviews separately measure food, "ambience" and service? Is it not possible to access the food component directly?
> 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.'
True. Everyone has the one thing they care about. I care about ambience. I barely notice the food.
> I care about ambience. I barely notice the food.
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.)
I was hoping when clicking on the article that they would also reveal new ways or collecting data of restaurants and their menus nearby, damn. Very fun article to read anyways!
Would overpass turbo maybe be a better alternative for finding specifics things depending of multiple clauses geographically?
There is an amazing kebab across the street from the Bordeaux train station. Your entire study is debunked!!
Tangential, and not a train station, but one of the best Turkish şiş kebabs I ever had was at Esenler Otogar (bus station) in Istanbul. The station is something out of a horror movie, but if you go up to the second floor there are some fantastic little places to eat.
Wouldn't it be "good, convenient, cheap - pick two" (at most)?
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.
Best Döner i ever eaten, was a small turkish kiez kebap in one of berlins backyard streets - they roasted the hell out of that chicken döner and you got only crust. Worst war lunch rushhour large chain kebap near the chinese embassy.
Kebabs are like cheese steaks; the best one is whichever is closest to wherever I am.
What's a cheese steak? Just a steak but with melted cheese on top? Doesn't that ruin the steak?
The steak is sliced very thin and cooked (often with cheese incorporated), so think of it as more of a beef sandwich than a steak on bread.
it would if it was actually a steak. for the type of meat you get on cheeesteaks - trust me - you want the cheese :)
Technically they're not allowed to call it cheese. ;)
lol
Ongoing discussion (due to the SCP) (58 points, 7 hours/4 days ago, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43123810
https://maps.app.goo.gl/7imPTP88PrYLpABb9 Best I've tried in Paris - Saint-Denis. Not near train.
There was briefly a fad where a person would review "HSP's" from every kebab store in their area, it might be easier to use a single users spread of reviews rather than average review scores.
The kebab shop in my local Tube station in London used to wrap his kebabs in free bakery counter bags stolen from the local Tesco. Presumably to save on costs.
I don't mind saying it was the worst kebab I've ever had.
Worst kebab in London is highly competitive race with no need for handicaps.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/7imPTP88PrYLpABb9
Best kebob in Stain-Denis, maybe all of Paris. Not close to train.
After a ten second glance, it looks like there are simply more kebab shops close to stations, and therefore a larger sample from which to see a broader range of ratings (including bad ones).
Finally someone using GIS data for the great good of humanity.
at some point of my life I was working on improving search results for the query "restaurant"
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.
> I'll be expecting my Nobel peace prize in the postbox and several job offers in my DMs within the next 3 working days.
This joke alone was worth the read.
It could be a one way correlation; i.e. the only way a bad kebab restaurant can survive is to be near a train station.
I find it difficult to compare this to real world results, because where I live has neither train stations nor kebabs.
The only place this isn't true is Japan.
Thinking about Turkey, that might not hold true either. Some of the best shops are both small and very close to mass transit in where I live.
I mean, it's not true in general if you actually read the article.
> 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.
> it's not true in general if you actually read the article.
Only if you agree with the article's methodology :)
Honestly NYC has a lot of its best restaurants by train stations, throughout every borough.
This was discussed by Taleb as “I’d rather my surgeon be ugly and not look like George Clooney.”
The notable exception perhaps is Kings Cross Station in London. Food is generally excellent.
Hmm but is it excellent for kebabs? I'm more a falafel person so can't really judge but I think crystal kebab is the only one and it doesn't do any form of deep fried chickpeas I rate the chinese place over the road though!
A study of life as limited and filtered to the Google-verse. I disapprove.
Cash only => good. "Bistro" in the name => bad.
I got sick off of train station sushi in Sydney. Never again
Well you would be fine in Japan.
So, this is anecdotal, and it's not true at the moment (because the end of the Santa Cruz wharf just fell into the ocean, and now the clam chowder restaurants are closed), but ...
... 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.
That's a massive number of kebab shops in Paris...
This made my day, it was science at its finest
Awesome post! Also, I dig your writing style
It makes logical sense. The closer a shop is to the train station, the more it pays in rent, requiring it to skimp on ingredient quality.
Presumably they’d have higher traffic to offset the rent increase. I would expect more quality damage from the fact that they effectively have guaranteed minimum traffic ala airports
It's not true though!
Try correcting for density first.
this thread is making me very hungry
For the Americans - by kebab it means gyro
Kebab and Gyro are pretty different in terms of bread, salad, sauce and even meat.
Also, Americans all know what kebab is, but not the case with gyro
[flagged]
I was actually expecting to see data that would refute the initial claim in the reverse! The outcome was not at all what I was expecting.
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?"
more please
Disappointed to discover OP didn't actually go and eat in all the kebab shops.
Many years ago I came up with a rule of thumb. Restaurants have three basic strategies, be a known quantity (chain), have a good location, or be actually good.
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.
The formal terminology is “selection induced negative correlation”. If a quality score is the sum of two factors, those two factors will tend to be negatively correlated.
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.
Also a type of collider bias in causal inference, which generates all sorts of Simpsons paradoxes
Are we still using real terminology?
Simpson’s paradox is a real thing in medical sampling. As far as the rest of it, who’s to say?
Berkson’s paradox is also real.
They are not mutually exclusive. Counter examples:
- 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)
Comments of this quality are getting frustrating.
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.
For what it's worth, I interpreted GP's response as trying to build on the rules of thumb by adding some color in the edge cases, I didn't read it as any kind of a dig at the original proposition.
Do you worship the posting guidelines or something? Are you that offended by someone adding information to a post? The forum is a public one, not a 1-1 conversation.
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?
>Comments of this quality are getting frustrating.
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.
"Getting"? HN has always been like this.
Christ this website can be so full of insufferable pedantry. I don't know why people think that such comments are a good contribution.
N gate died far too soon...
i made a markov chain off the site after converting to json and the first generate_sentence():
> "contextualize for a good old-fashioned shitfight about the internet. Hackernews does software they vote on their eggs in Google's ultimate"
I'm unwilling to share that json here, because of the implications.
btw i remembered both of you that mentioned it this week, and got up and pwshed it out.
Is Katz's actually a great location? It is for some--well, many/most places in Manhattan are a great location for some given the density--but it's hell and gone from Midtown, UES, etc. As someone who has visited Manhattan semi-regularly over the years (and even lived there for a summer) I think I've been to Katz's once and would never have described it as convenient.
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).
Katz's is great because it is one of the last "old school Delicatessens". There used to be more convenient deli's all over Manhattan.
A number have gone out of business to be sure. There's still a (couple?) 2nd Ave deli. Not sure what else there is at this point.
Probably one of the most famous examples is Jiro sushi which is in a subway station.
I think it's probably even more close to being the opposite. Well known Restaurants in great locations tend to actually be very good. I think being good and in a good location leads to restaurants being well known. But I also think people claim Chick-fil-a and McDonald's aren't good are lying to themselves. Those restaurants routinely focus-group their food and make sure that it's ranked very high for taste and not just among their fast food counterparts. It an acquired distaste for people not to like it.
"times square olive garden" hahaha
They're not mutually exclusive because they're a triangle.
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.
these examples are all exceptions. how much do the exceptions contribute to the discussion?
> how much do the exceptions contribute to the discussion?
A fair amount, if the number of exceptions are such that the rule of thumb isn't useful.
Do you know what "rule of thumb" means? Did you think you were being helpful?
> Do you know what "rule of thumb" means?
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?
I really don't think the 5 provided examples do much - I can't even imagine how "Katz deli in NYC" would be a useful data point at all.
One other:
- 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.
Where I live, video slots have infiltrated many restaurants. It is weird!
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.
Based on the empirical evidence from OP, this seems correct. But there's a theoretical argument for why "good location" and "actually good" should be positively correlated:
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.
Your logic works in a world with only restaurants. In reality, every other type of business has better margins than restaurants and also competes for the best real estate. So the good restaurant in a good location is soon having their rent hiked and closing down, or has to follow the beaten path: Decrease quality and increase prices.
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.
This falls apart a bit if providing better food costs more. Restaurants with better food may earn more revenue all else being equal but their costs may be higher. People are willing to pay more for the same quality of food in a better location. It makes sense for a the restaurant with worse food to outbid a restaurant with better food because the location is more important to them and they are allocating more money towards towards rent rather than food quality so they have more to spend.
> People are willing to pay more for the same quality of food in a better location
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.
This addresses supply (cost) but not demand. There won't be enough demand for known bad food, unless it's a tourist trap.
This is how I think of it too. In a popular location, the restaurants won't necessarily be the best, but they'll be better on average.
Also, compare any big city to its adjacent areas. Like everyone knows LA has better food than San Bernardino.
I’d posit that closer proximity to drinking establishments would mean increased foot traffic with a less discerning clientele.
Every kebob is a good kebob when you’re a few drinks in.
You lost me at point 4. Why would more revenue mean a higher willingness to pay rent unless it made them more profit?
A restaurant that has more money can afford more rent. A restaurant that doesn't have more money can't afford it. So, everything else being equal, better restaurants, making more money, are more likely to rent places that cost more since. Seems pretty straight forward.
it's no different than saying people with higher income, overall, rent/buy housing that costs more.
My only rule is that restaurants in hotels are usually mediocre to bad, which fits with your theory. If they have some built-in customer base they don’t have to work as hard at being good.
Does not apply to the very top end where many luxury hotels also have Michelin starred fine dining restaurants
Yeah. A random mid-range Marriott probably has an utterly boring hotel restaurant serving fairly mid-range mostly boring fare. You get up to the high-end and you're much more likely to get restaurants that don't really seem like hotel restaurants at all.
I remember reading an article that had the theory that Thai restaurants in hotels were usually very authentic under the assumption that the parents were immigrants who wanted the child to inherit the business, but the kid wanted to run a restaurant instead. It would certainly explain why you get Thai restaurants attached to random hotels in the middle of nowhere, at least.
The Thai government practices gastro-diplomacy, they have a program where you set a Thai restaurant up in a foreign country, you can pick from three different packages for size or fanciness of restaurant. It's why you see a lot of the same decorations and similarities between differently owned Thai restaurants, or occasionally a family will own a number in a metro area.
/s missing?
> The Department of Export Promotion of the Thai Ministry of Commerce offers potential restaurateurs plans for three different "master restaurant" types—from fast food to elegant—which investors can choose as a prefabricated restaurant plan.
from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culinary_diplomacy#Thailand
No, this is why there are so many Thai restaurants relative to their population. Even most small towns will have one or two.
It does vary. Some are more independent of the hotel than others. And the rule of thumb probably tends to be less true outside of the US.
> restaurants in hotels are usually mediocre to bad
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.
Hotel restaurants are feature placebo. They are give the impression of added value/fanciness, even if they are rarely accessed by value-conscious guests.
Many people are tired from traveling and they just want a meal before they go to sleep.
My rule for finding a good restaurant - if it doesn't look that good and/or is in an out of the way place but seems to be busy, its probably good.
My rule. Check TripAdvisor!
Is being well-rated on TripAdvisor a positive or negative signal? I could see it either way.
You need like always to read some of the reviews and judge. If sceptical look at the users histories (e.g. I seen perfect 5 star reviews in Google then seen the users were bots even though the comments sounded ok)
Depends on the stakes too: anniversary dinner or grabbing a coffee in a different part of town?
Given lack of other signals, my experience is that TripAdvisor or Yelp is probably better than "they have a cool name." I've been living out of a hotel because of a kitchen fire and, as someone who really wasn't in the habit of eating out around where I live, the recommendations have generally been decent--combines with a neighbor and personal knowledge.
A great way to detect who buys ikea furniture!
OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
Actually OP found a very small correlation between railway proximity and Google rating. The study didn't actually measure "quality"...
Also, the lowest scoring outliers were the closest proximity, which I think is noteworthy.
And probably understandable. Empirically, I don't really expect to find the best restaurants right around railway stations.
Yeah. The overall correlation was tiny but just looking at it you could see a pattern that's getting lost in the analysis.
On location, consider discriminating by repeating versus non-repeating flow. Repeat flow tends to encourage good food. If you fuck up the food, you go out of business. Non-repeating flow encourages tourist traps.
I'd be curious about the article's study being re-run with a dummy variable for predominantly commuter versus tourist train stations.
This supports the inverse square rule for seafood restaurant quality vs. being near the ocean. There are good places, but right on the water? Universally bad.
I wouldn't say universally bad. I live in Seattle, and there are some restaurants on the water that I like.
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.
Shipping of sea food is expensive so even the cheapest distant resteraunt will pay for premium prices since the difference isn't that much. Near the shore you can save buying cheap - but if you know what you are looking for you can buy the best off the boat for cheap.
Less true if you're talking about seafood "shacks." Tons of good places serving lobster rolls and steamers on the ocean in Maine for example. But, yes, for fancier restaurants especially in cities, the best views often don't come with the best food.
El Bulli was considered the best restaurant in the world until it voluntarily closed and it is right on the Mediterranean with a dock. The web site even had directions to reach it by boat.
If this is true at all, it only applies to cities. Many fantastic seafood restaurants are on or near the docks in regions economically dependent on seafood production.
If this were true, the best seafood in Australia would be in Alice Springs.
Conversely, I have one piece of life advice for you: Don't eat seafood in Alice Springs.
Totally agree but I would expand location into convenience. For example, I find restaurants that don't take reservations or have limited hours are often better.
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.
I used to try random restaurants that don't look good, then I realized that they usually are in fact not good.
My rule of thumb: if it has the name of the country, i expect the food to be at best sub-par i.e "Great Indian" (gave me wild food poisoning).
Second rule of thumb: if the milkshakes are good, the food will be good - almost never fails me.
For kebab some comedian gave the best advice - look at the knuckles of the kebab maker - if they are very hairy it will be good. Then look at the neckline of his shirt - if there are hairs coming out of it - the kebab will be great.
this reminds me my experience: when I went to Salt Lake City and wanted to try Turkish food and picked nearest Turkish restaurant with the the highest reviews from google maps.
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.
Have a friend who rates ethnic restaurants by the decor. The fancier the place: the worse the food.
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.
Well on the topic of kebab, good Persian restaurants usually have better decor.
Hm. Not in the case described.
My family members from Iran and Syria have said that people there cook beef extra because it's usually not very fresh, unless they're rich. So overcooked beef may be the more authentic way, depending on how you look at it. Lamb is more common anyway.
There’s a bizarrely good place in Dublin called China Sichuan (double whammy; country _and_ region), located in, basically, a business park 20 minutes from the city centre in a tram. It has no business being any good; combo of name and suburban location should condemn it to mediocrity at absolute best.
(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.)
> (double whammy; country _and_ region)
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.
I agree. But one exception, a lot of good Syrian restaurants aren't named for a region in Syria, or the country, but some greater region that includes Syria (usually "Shaam").
Reminds me of Panda Gourmet in DC. It’s near the edge of the city, not accessible by Metro, the name sounds it should be in a mall and it’s attached to a Days Inn budget hotel. And it’s probably the best Chinese restaurant in the city.
For a long time, the best Thai restaurant in New York State (in my, and many others', opinions) was called simply "Thai Cuisine".
I know nothing about the Thai or Vietnamese languages, but it seems like all their proper nouns have "Thai" or "Viet" in them.
I've been to several great restaurants with "china" and "burma" in their names. also "siam" and "thai" but not actually "thailand" that I can remember.
Great China.
Where does crappy restaurant fit into your taxonomy?
It's a maximum of two, not a minimum. The minimum is zero: low quality expensive food in an inconvenient location.
Luckily, those usually go out of business. Un-luckily, you may be a customer first.
Have a good location
Good location or bankrupt. Just look at all the tourist trap restoraunts.
> tourist trap restoraunts
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.
There's a waiter standing outside trying to get people to come in, and I don't mean the reservation / front desk person. No way is it worthwhile for a restaurant with actually good food to pay someone to advertise outside.
its either mcdonalds (well known) or close to work (good location). i still eat at crappy restaurants if they have 1 good item.
we used to go a chinese place and we called it "spicy chicken." everything else on the menu was trash
good location = higher rent = food better attract people
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.
When I moved to the West Village in NYC, the first night I went to a kebab place right by my building. The owner was talkative and friendly and gave me a free cup of ayran. I went back regularly, but the place was almost always empty. Meanwhile, visiting friends would always want to go to a different kebab place just down the block. For the first year I stayed loyal to that friendly kebab shop owner, until one day I went to the other kebab place. Long lines and... much better food! I never went back to the first one.
And the kebab circle of life is complete. People are ruthless when it comes to food prices/quality.
It was all quality. The food was so much better at the second place that even if the first place was free I wouldn't have gone back
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This is a good example where a summary produced by much-hated AI (GPT 4o) is quite useful (to people who do not want to read all details in he article):
"In his study, James Pae examined the hypothesis: "The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab." Focusing on Paris, he analysed kebab shops' proximity to train and metro stations alongside their Google review ratings. His findings revealed a negligible correlation between a kebab shop's distance from stations and its review ratings, suggesting the hypothesis lacks substantial evidence. Pae acknowledges potential influencing factors such as tourism and review biases and expresses intentions to revisit the study for further analysis."
I don't think a lot of people have a problem with AI summaries (a lot of people are using AI for exactly that). I think the 'hate' mostly comes from the fact that people tend to copy/paste whatever AI says without adding anything to the conversation.
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.
Asking a question to a coworker and having him copy paste from chatgpt has to be the worst thing about being a programmer in 2025.
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?
For what it's worth, I do hate people pasting their AI summaries to the comments. Not only are they adding nothing, they are actively detracting from the conversation; they have just pasted a wall of text without fact-checking it. And in fact, this "summary" misrepresents the article; it completely ignores the humor and presents it as a serious scientific endeavour.
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 read the article and fact-checked the summary before posting. The original article is quite long, so the summary may be useful for those who are intrigued by the title and just want to know the outcome.
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.
