Fortune's Mark Gimein suffers through dinner with Tim and Nina Zagat, publishers, obviously, of the Zagat guides. Perhaps they're lovely people — as lovely as two lawyers can be, of course — but they don't really come off that way:

Should you have a chance to dine with the Zagats at one of New York City's fancier restaurants, take it. Not only will the chef send your table free raw fish, but after 19 seconds I timed it Tim will ask for more. Tim Zagat once asked Sirio Maccioni, the great New York restaurateur, how he recognized the New York Times restaurant critic beneath her wig and dark glasses. "Don't you think," Maccioni said, "that if a tank rolled into my restaurant with a hat and wig and dark glasses, I would still know it was a tank?" Now Zagat himself is the tank, and since the Zagats don't vote in their own surveys ("Caesar's wife ...," Nina says), they don't even need disguises. "It's nice to see what a restaurant can do when they really try," Tim says.

"What is your best fish?" he demands, after we take our table at Esca ("a restaurant to return to again and again" Zagat 2004). The menu sits unopened by his elbow. "Do you have a branzino? What does the chef say? Is the chef around?"

Table for Mr. Bigfoot [Fortune]

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