Why doesn't Yelp just show how a restaurant's inflated ratings compare to its competitors' inflated ratings, thus negating the surplus of stars? VentureBeat's Kim-Mai Cutler asked, and Yelp answered: "Virtually identical ratings mean people have to dive into reviews to understand what's different, said Vince Sollitto, who heads communications for the San Francisco-based company." Translation: Confusion means more traffic means more advertising dough.

Which is too bad for hard-core Yelpers used to being pampered by gladhanding restaurateurs: Once owners figure out how easy it is to get five stars, the free drinks and food are over.

(Graphic via Yelp blog)

Now this offer, originally blogged by San Francisco PR man Jared Rivera, doesn't say you have to write a positive review on Yelp. Just any old review, of this restaurant. But if you didn't enjoy your meal, a 20 percent discount on the next one isn't going to motivate you to do anything, including writing a Yelp review. Those who do write up a review will be inclined to add extra star-age, since they'll be presenting the review directly to restaurant staff. It all adds to an easy way for the restaurant — in this case, Mel's, an unremarkable 1950s style diner — to juice their online ratings.

This sort of red-carpet treatment is baked into Yelp's business model; the San Francisco company regularly invites its favored users to "Yelp Elite" events where they are wined and dined at a restaurant's expense. A flood of positive reviews often follows.

Some restaurants have also taken to targeting heavy users of foursquare, an iPhone application that lets you "check-in" to a particular location. Become enough of a regular, and foursquare will crown you "mayor" of that spot. The app is only five months old, but already the owner of Lure and Chinatown Brasserie in downtown New York is buttering up Lure "mayor" Scott Kidder with off-the-menu dishes. "Beyond bullshit" was how Eater.com co-founder Lockhart Steele reacted to this VIP treatment on Twitter. (Disclaimer: Kidder handles my paychecks; Steele used to oversee Gawker.com.)

Of course, restaurants have always kowtowed to opinion shapers. Esquire critic John Mariani is among those known for accepting free meals from restaurants that end up in his magazine; even critics who pay their own way can benefit from lavish chef attention when they do not visit anonymously. But old-school favor trading was at least subtle, visible mainly to media critics and industry insiders — the proverbial making of the sausage was no more in the diner's face than the literal.

Catering to the large and growing corps of Web VIPs is, by necessity, a more explicit affair. This transparency can be unappetizing, especially when it looks desperate, as on the receipt above. But it does send a useful signal to diners about the priorities of the people from whom they buy food and service. And at a time when diners increasingly do want to know how their sausage is made, they might as well also learn something about the manufacture of restaurant buzz. Of both the organic and synthetic sort.

[via Michael Bauer, San Francisco Chronicle]

(Top pic: A Yelp Elite event in San Francisco, via Yelp on Flickr)

See, Colicchio's not actually opening a new restaurant; he's starting a venture called "Tom: Tuesday Dinner" that will open up every other Tuesday, then disappear! The first exotic location for your pricey meal? A "tiny space" in the private dining room of Craft, another one of his already existing restaurants!

Reservations will be taken by telephone six weeks in advance, and the price of the meal ($150 to $250 depending on the menu) will have to be prepaid with a credit card. Menus will only be announced about a week before each meal; they will be posted on a website, tomtuesdaydinner.com.

If this works out, we're starting a new venture: "Track me down at an undisclosed location and pay me $1,000 and I will tell you where the nearest McDonald's is."

Nobu does not specify on its menus which species of tuna it serves. Requests for the information by campaigners have been met for several years with a terse "no comment".

Although it is not illegal to serve Atlantic bluefin, also known as northern bluefin, many chefs, including Gordon Ramsay, have dropped it because of concern that fishing is at higher levels than stocks can withstand. At Nobu Berkeley St, which has one Michelin star, investigators asked for Atlantic bluefin (hon maguro in Japanese) but staff told them the restaurant did not stock it. However, DNA tests proved that the fish they were given was indeed Atlantic bluefin.

[A] second dish they ordered, described only as "o-toro", the fattiest belly meat, was Atlantic bluefin. At Nobu London, a waitress told the investigators that a dish on the menu was hon maguro. The fish that was served tested positive as Atlantic bluefin.

The lack of clear information about the species of tuna on sale at Nobu could land the restaurants in trouble. A spokesman for Westminster city council said that falsely describing food was an offence.

Willie Mackenzie of Greenpeace said: "Nobu and Robert De Niro are clearly making a great deal of money serving up endangered fish." The restaurant declined to comment. [Telegraph]

Unfortunately, our first visit to Gjelina only got worse from there.

At least the restaurant itself was nice to look at.

The main room had black walls with flowery engravements, offset by rich, warm wood.

They used wine bottles as decoration in another back room, with empty bottles comprising a dramatic chandelier.

The outside area was a mix of luxe and laid back, with a dramatic opening to the sky, offset by the architecture's clean lines and softened by billowing trees.

A fireplace burned in the center.

The bathroom's were even nice—old timey white tiles with dark wood touches. And you turned on the faucet with a giant wheel.

The kitchen was viewable through a long rectangular window. From our vantage point we could see a number of very hot blond surfer/skater type men working diligently away. We made a mental note to sit at the table underneath the window next time.

That is, if there was a next time.

The buffalo mozzarella appetizer finally arrived 45 minutes after we ordered it and, surprisingly, it didn't disappoint. But as my companion said, "You can't fuck up fresh buffalo mozzarella." However, they would have several other opportunities to screw up. First, the fries: they were overly salty and very small. It was as if we got the last bits at the bottom of the batch. Fail. The artichokes arrived and they also tasted like they had been doused in a bucket of salt. (Side note — don't drink wine and eat artichokes at the same time. It creates a very bad chemical reaction in your mouth and makes the wine taste like crap.)

The plate that was to be the pièce de résistance—the pork belly— was lukewarm and not as crispy as advertised and, shocker (!), too salty. My friend and I realized that this was the last of our dishes. She looked over at me, and said, "Is this the kind of place where we spend $100 and are still so hungry we have to go to the taco truck afterwards?" Yes. sadly, it seemed it was.

But because I am nothing if not fair (and nice!), I went back a second time with a different friend. Our ditzy blonde waitress was replaced by a flirty, dark-haired hunk (major improvement!), who, when we asked him about dessert, said, lustily, "Oooooooh, yes, they are allllll verrrrryyyyyy gooood." We made him talk about the desserts at least three times. We were seated closer to the Window of Hot Chefs and next to the fire pit, which had distinct advantages (it caused our waiter, during his second recital of the dessert menu to say, "Oooh my ass is on fire!" which was amusing), and disadvantages (one side of our face was burning up.) This time, the food and service was better; the asparagus came with egg and parmesan cheese, a surprisingly good combination.

And, I should note, this time it wasn't too salty. The albacore tuna carpaccio-concoction was just right, and the margarita pizza was light and crisp; it was almost like eating a fancy, well-made cracker.

And the dessert? Soooo gooood. Some sort of butterscotch pecan goodness with a lime-like infusion in the whip cream. I left substantially fuller than the first time. Of course, this could be because I ate an entire plate of fettucine alfredo before leaving my house. So, verdict: Though it's improving in quality and service, Gjelina is still a place where you will spend $100 and leave hungry. But at least it's pretty!

The detonation will be broadcast live on the company's website. The message of this stunt? "Our company sucks."

Teaser ads for detonation day include a sledgehammer wielding marketing executive who smashes a hanging lamp that would have been found in an "old" Ruby Tuesday's. Full-page newspaper ads show the brand's "manifesto" with copy shaped like a bomb.

If this doesn't work, they can just run ads saying "PLEASE GO TO APPLEBEE'S."

[BrandWeek via Adfreak]

"The first thing I tell them is to round up every price that ends with 95 cents to 99 cents. You've got an item $10.95, raise it to $10.99. If it's $7.75, make it $7.79. All the chains have done it — Applebee's, Chili's, all of them. It's just four cents and your customers won't notice, but that could easily mean $5,000 to $15,000 a year for the restaurant."

There's a science to where on the menu you display that price, too, he says. Take a typical two-column menu: The description of the food is on the left, and the price is an inch or two from the description, on the right. Bad idea, says Mentzer. Get rid of the second column, he recommends, and put the price at the end of the sentence that describes the dish.

"You want people to read the price after they've read the description," he explains, "not before."

Spelling out prices on the menu instead of printing them in numerals supposedly also helps people buy more, but I always thought it was a damning sign of pretentiousness. In any case, the article is quick to point out that this is aimed strictly at increasing the food industry's profit margins, not at making Americans any more fit or less fat than we already are. Relax, fat Americans.

By mealtime, many cooks will be tired of hovering over the turkey and ready to unload it, but just try to find a taker.

"One year my 13-year-old nephew, Josh, was the only one willing to take it on," said Nissa Goldstein, a retired teacher in West Hartford, Conn. "Of course, everyone was shouting instructions at him, and he ended up locking himself in his room and refusing to come out."

But Josh isn't alone; the turkey terror lurks everywhere! "One year the turkey took a long time to cook and I went to carve it after about 13 beers," said Maurice Landry, who lives near Lake Charles, LA. "The way I remember it, I bore down to take off the leg and the whole thing went shooting off the platter and knocked over the centerpiece." Indeed, why wield a knife at all if you aren't a little bit buzzed?

With the proof of a problem's existence established rather indisputably by just two "One year..." recollections, Moskin moves on to the meat of her story. The Goldsteins and Landrys aren't heard from again—which makes one wonder: how exactly were these folks from "West Hartford" and "Lake Charles" identified as prime sources on holidays hysteria? And who's making sure they stay in treatment for good this time?

Butcher's Method Takes Carving Off the Table [NYT]

She says the problem might be the free coffee that the restaurant generously provides to guests whose idea of fun is sitting sprawled on the concrete sidewalk outside the restaurant, bragging about their hangovers for the hour that it takes to get seated. "Then there are the people who get too amped on the caffeine; when they sit down and finally look at the menu, they're so amped that their brain can't connect what they want, with communicating it with the server, with what's on the menu." Overcaffeinated hipsters! Scary.

Even scarier, though is a dangerous Jersey element that Scalora says has recently encroached, bringing all kinds of outlandish requests with them. "Maybe once a week I get a group of people ordering dirty martinis and coffee with dessert, or decaf or Splenda. All these things that aren't what happens at Enid's." Could this spell the end of brunch as we know it? We can only dream. —Emily

Lynnea Scalora Can Tell Her Hipsters Apart [NYM]

So Wells, Bruni and Meehan have stepped in to lay down the hurt. The result? Wells re-proves himself an able writer and Meehan, who will occasionally pitch in with the briefs, works Venn Diagrams, mega man and Druid Fluid into one review.

At the same time, while it's nice that the Times wants so hard to be a blog, the addition of Dining Briefs and the downsizing of $25 and Under doesn't play to the paper's strength. A weekly section will never be able to keep up with blogs like Eater and others in terms of up-to-the-minute reviews. What the Times does and has historically done well is offer an authoritative well-informed adventurous voice to guide readers. Claiborne, Sheraton, Reichl, Grimes, Meehan and Bruni aren't meant entirely to be reporters, in the sense that they're not just conductors of data who traffic in facts. They traffic in taste, and context. By its brevity, these "casual reviews" preclude the sort of descriptions often needed to accurately convey a taste explosion in a mouth.

And, because the paper still is a paper and thus finite, the addition of Dining Briefs means the frequency of $25 and Under will be halved. That's a shame, really for the 14 Times readers whose household income doesn't exceed 6 digits. "Ten years ago $25 and Under wasn't a cheap eats column. It used to cover family-owned Italian places on the Upper East Side. Now, there's no way we could include those restaurants," said Wells. Well, Meehan and his peripatetic wanderings will be missed. Wells thinks this: "It's not the readers who are changing. It's the city." That is to say, like briefs, getting constrictive, and maybe a little snug. —Josh

But that's small change compared with the tactical maneuvers required for eating lunch. Imagine, if you will, Armani-uniformed agents standing in line with soccer moms at the Westfield mall's food court or balancing plastic trays loaded up with beer-battered chicken or Fuddruckers fries. "With all the suits and sunglasses, it feels like "The Matrix: The Food Court," joked manager-producer J.C. Spink ("A History of Violence").

And with such brazenly public dining come perils. "You can't really talk business because you've got CAA right there. And they've got us," said an ICM agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity (silence is the agency policy when dealing with the press). "I've heard people at CAA having their conversations — you can hear everything." [...]

"It's gotten worse in the last three weeks," said a retired banker waiting in a long line at Barenaked Yogurt.

Around him, people — many of them in suits — were balancing trays, looking desperately for a free table. One young man grunted, "This sucks!" as he wheeled around and continued his search in another direction.

With tensions running dangerously high on both sides from the uncomfortable, privacy-hampering proximity forced upon them by the cramped accommodations, it shouldn't be long before things escalate to actual violence. We predict that by the end of the month (see above for proof of our prescience in this matter), there will be daily skirmishes in which phalanxes of expendable assistants, armed with plastic tray shields and fistfuls of disposable cutlery, assemble at high noon at opposite ends of their casual-dining battlefield, poised to join in fierce hand-to-hand combat upon their bosses's orders to "Unleash hell, you little pee-ons!," with the agency left with the greatest number of uninjured, spork-wielding call-rollers awarded the prime tables next to the California Crisp.

[Photo: LAT]

• Power plays — for a food court table [LAT]
• Previously: CAA's Century City Invasion: So It Begins [Defamer]
• Talent Agency Exodus To Change The Face Of Power-Eating [Defamer]

• Caffe Falai stays open until 10:30 pm starting Thursday. New menu as of next week.
  
• The New Yorker continues its bizarre doppleganging of the NYT with a tables for two on EU.
  
• Marc Myer's Landmarc opens a week early at the Time Warner Center. Breakfast, Lunch AND dinner, suckas.
  
• Balthazar nemesis FR*OG is slated to open on Monday, April 23. Nearly two weeks later than anticipated.

• P*ONG, Pichet Ong's new spot and FR*OG's brother in asterisk, flooded on Sunday and won't open until the 20th. Ah, le deluge
  
• That vortex of restaurant ventures known as 245-247 Houston (corner of Norfolk) is about to get another tenant. Last night, the shuttered space that once housed Canapa boasted a sign informing residents of an application for a beer and wine license. The petitioner? The Remedy Diner.
  
• UES Taco Taco slated to open in LES on 205 Allen St. CB3 provisionally denies liquor license application.
  
• This guy is the biggest douche in all of NY chefdom. Guaranteed.
• LA Weekly Food Critic Jonathan Gold wins a Pulitzer. Bruni weeps hot tears into Esca's pasta.
• Women grow their own sperm. WTF?