Are Restaurant Reviews any use

Restaurants come and restaurants go - writing about and reviewing places to eat is like describing the shape of a puff of smoke, quality and service are constantly changing and what was great on Monday may be indifferent on Tuesday and awful on Wednesday.

If a reviewer has a bad meal the first time they go to a new restaurant, they are unlikely to go back and they will not give a good report, yet for most of the time that estabishment may offer great value and service, or not!

I have tried to include reviews about local eating places several times. To have a reasonably large list (25+  establishments) would need a visit at least once a month to keep tabs on new owners, changes of chef, new menues and so many other things that any decent list would be impossible to keep. I would certainly be a lot fatter.

Pezenas is a smallish town with a few dozen eating places, we have lived near Pezenas for fifteen years and I still cannot recommend more then a couple of places to eat as the ones I once liked have changed so much and I can only suggest ones we have been to in the last couple of weeks

So how can you choose a good restaurant if reviews are out of date or unreliable? One well proven method  is to choose the one which is full, never one which is empty - but therein lies the problem, if it is full you will not get a table.

The answer seems tobe comingwith some Web2 community sites - a lot of new services and blogs are joining together to create reports andfeedback from many people - this in turn will generate new sites tospecialise on giving local information and information from a number or people. So you will soon be able to go to a regional blog (this one for example) look for a tag or catorgory like “eating” and search for a town or for a type of food.

Feedback will be from many other blogs and travelers and be up to date and much more relevant than the opinion of one person or one website.

I hope to be offering a range of services  like this which are really useful.