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.
I have read the article, and actually came to the different conclusion than the author. This 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. Therefore, if you've ever gotten a bad donor kebab, we can safely assume that you purchased it from a kebab shop near a train station.
Maybe there are so many potential customers for kebab near train stations, and it allows mediocre kebab shops to be profitable?
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.
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.
>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.
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?
"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...
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.
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.
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.
Probably one of the most famous examples is Jiro sushi which is in a subway station.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Hotel restaurants are feature placebo. They are give the impression of added value/fanciness, even if they are rarely accessed by value-conscious guests.
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!
A great way to detect who buys ikea furniture!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 or bankrupt. Just look at all the tourist trap restoraunts.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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)
At the end of article it's shown that only considering train stations didn't really change the result.
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....
Try fitting something non-linear or simply plot a mean (or median) rating over distance with some smoothing.
This was discussed by Taleb as “I’d rather my surgeon be ugly and not look like George Clooney.”
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
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.
Sometimes in another office building's lobby.
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 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.)
Finally someone using GIS data for the great good of humanity.
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!
Cash only => good. "Bistro" in the name => bad.
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.
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.
I'm never going to look at ratings. The only use there is photos of menus, food, and the restaurant itself.
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.
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).
"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
There is an amazing kebab across the street from the Bordeaux train station. Your entire study is debunked!!
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).
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
Then OP shouldn't have used that title. My reasoning still stands.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ongoing discussion (due to the SCP) (58 points, 7 hours/4 days ago, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43123810
This made my day, it was science at its finest
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!
For the Americans - by kebab it means gyro
Awesome post! Also, I dig your writing style
this thread is making me very hungry
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.
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???
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.
My favorite German food is Turkish. My favorite British food is Lebanese.
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.
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 :)
I got sick off of train station sushi in Sydney. Never again
Well you would be fine in Japan.
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.
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.
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 think they consider "pepperoni" and "salami"
Mate, spicy snags are spicy snags
Edit: Used the actual aussie word for sausages...
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
Disappointed to discover OP didn't actually go and eat in all the kebab shops.
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...
