I've come to not trust professional critics for their reviews for anything. First of all, they're paid to prepare reviews, and they know that bad reviews are what sells whatever paper, magazine, or other publication they work for. Good reviews do as well, but people love slander.



I like reading reviews from "average joes" like myself, but I know not to 100% trust them either. I look for common denominators in all reviews. What was good? What was bad? I look at both the good and the bad reviews. I don't just look and see that the overall rating for a restaurant is 4.5 or 5 stars; if a restaurant has 1 star, I want to know why. Was it the food, the cleanliness, or the attentiveness of the staff?



If the food and service get high marks overall, I'll be willing to try it. If I loved it or liked it, I might post a review myself, I might not. Usually a restaurant would have to really win me over or repel me in order to write a review. Even if one thing was great, but nothing else was, I'll make a note of it.



One thing I noticed about a lot of the restaurants that had the 3-hoof rating: All of them sacrificed the quality of the flavor of their food for the quality of the decor and presentation. I think this is why I don't like going into many of the fancy frou-frou restaurants. The decor is off-putting, and it, to me, ruins the experience. It tends to make the food taste bland.



Whereas a restaurant's decor that's as homely as the restaurant in the episode, often has the best food ever. I think part of that is psychological. If you decorate your restaurant to have a more "homely" feel, like the one in the episode, and some Chinese, Italian, Mexican, and Southern BBQ places I'd been into that did that, the food tastes better. Like I said, it has to be psychological. It has a more homely feel to it, and so it's like you're stepping more into someone's home who might be of that ethnicity or region, than into a sterile business that sells that type of cuisine. You ever noticed how a small, privately-owned Italian restaurant that looks run-down tastes loads better than the big chains or someplace that looks all fancy? Yeah, that's why.



Granted, there can be exceptions, but for the most part, this is what I've experienced.