By giving voice to diners and showcasing a wider culinary landscape, Zagat transformed the food world. The nearly 40-year-old brand, which was started by lawyer couple Tim and Nina Zagat, pioneered the concept of user-generated content by surveying eaters and averaging their scores into different ratings for food, décor, and service.
As Fast Company shares in a new, exclusive oral history, the resulting burgundy guidebooks radically shifted both how people decided where to eat and their overall power at the table. (And do lots of other stuff; there were category spin-offs galore.) In 2011, Google acquired the company to try to take that magic online. Now a new chapter begins for the Zagat brand, having been acquired earlier this year by review site and social media darling The Infatuation.
Here, food-world insiders share what it was like to experience the dawn of crowdsourcing.
Tim Zagat: There was a kosher restaurant, and we didn’t mention it as being kosher. They sent us a nasty note and said it was creating havoc. All these people were coming in, and when they found out that it was kosher they got up and left. I got it straightened out in a subsequent printing. Then [the owner] got upset because he’d decided he [didn’t want to be] kosher anymore, he was getting so much business.
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