Pity the lives of my poor colleagues at the The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide, Australia's annual food bible, released this week. To spend one's days and nights ingesting, on the company purse, the very best of Australian fine dining must be, I imagine, torture.
And yet, they persevere, for you dear reader; that you may enjoy the best value gastronomical experiences for your own precious dollars.
More Food Videos
Sydney Good Food Guide Awards 2017
See which top chefs get their hats at the restaurant industry's night of nights, the Good Food Guide awards 2017.
It is the mission of economics, too, to help maximise pleasure from expenditure. Indeed a growing field of economics is devoted to deploying the insights of the profession to the quest for good food. American economist, Tyler Cowan's 2012 book, An Economist Gets Lunch, advised diners travelling abroad to save their pennies and follow the locals.
Now, a new breed of young, data-savvy economists have struck upon a decidedly less enjoyable – but potentially more accurate – method of dishing out dining advice.
![Illustration: Simon Letch](/web/20161115194837im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/b/s/m/s/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grbjz8.png/1473379201903.jpg)
Rather than hors d'oeuvre and digestif, these economists' restaurant reviews begin and end with spreadsheets.
Enter the winner of this year's Australian young economist of the year, as decided by the Economics Society of Australia, Queensland University of Technology's Lionel Page. In a recent paper co-authored with two other young economists – Jeanne Dall'Orso and Romain Gauriot– the trio have mined data from restaurant review website Yelp.
According to economic theory, diners face a host of problems in the quest for a nice meal out.
Not only do they face significant variance between restaurants, in terms of quality and price, they also face large potential search costs, in terms of time and energy – not to mention a growling belly – from spending too much time trying to chose between the various offerings.
![New research has revealed the worst place to dine out.](/web/20161115194837im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/l/m/p/a/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grbjz8.png/1473319349451.jpg)
Most problematically, all new diners to a restaurant face a unique problem because restaurant meals are what economists call "experienced goods" – the quality of which can only be assessed by consuming them, not before. You must buy your dinner, and eat it too, before you will know whether it's quality.
This information gap explains the historical reliance on reviews by trusted advisers, such as the Good Food Guide, or, more recently, user generated review websites like Yelp.
Page and co were particularly keen to find out whether restaurants which are more visible to potential customers are necessarily of lower quality.
Economic theory says businesses will set their prices and the quality of product according to the knowledge of their customers. The less informed the customers you have, the more you will charge and the lower quality service you will offer. Tourists are particular targets, being less well aware of alternative options and facing search costs to find them.
You must buy your dinner, and eat it too, before you will know whether it's quality.
But it's not just touristy restaurants. Restaurants located on street corners also derive a strategic benefit by being more visible to more uninformed customers, being able to be seen from two streets, not just one.
To test this link between restaurant visibility and quality, the economists mined data from 1.6 million Yelp reviews across 10 global cities: including Las Vegas, Montreal, Edinburgh and Germany's Karlsruhe. As part of a "data-set challenge", Yelp has made this information available to researchers.
The trio matched this data with geospatial data from Open Street Map, a non-profit organisation wanting to create open source geospatial data from local governments and other sources.
The team were able to code each restaurant according to its distance from a tourist attraction and distance from a street corner.
Their finding?
There is indeed a strong negative link between restaurant quality – as defined by star ratings – and proximity to tourist attractions and street corners.
Indeed, to ensure a restaurant's location is not negatively impacting quality, one must dine outside a two-kilometre radius of all tourist attractions. And if you absolutely must dine out in a tourist area, make sure it is not a corner restaurant. A restaurant on a corner of a major intersection within a 500-metre radius of a tourist attraction was found to score one-fifth of a star lower on average.
Might it be such restaurants are just more likely to be fast-food joints? No, the authors were able to control for restaurant type and price range.
So is your neighbourhood corner restaurant safe? Yes. Turns out, restaurants outside of touristy areas but on street corners see no negative location effect, with the authors saying this is likely due to more knowledgeable locals.
In their final discussion, the authors note new technologies and easy access to review websites on your smartphone may diminish these effects over time.
But for now, economics theory, backed up by this fresh statistical evidence, suggests if you are looking for a good meal, on average you're best to get off the beaten track.
Indeed, on the cover page to their academic paper, the researchers include this quote from J.R.R Tolkien:
"Still round the corner there may wait,
A new road or a secret gate."
In the quest for good food, as in life, it pays to be an intrepid traveller.