Review of the Restaurant Review Websites
There are so many restaurant review sites that I don't know where to begin.... Here are some popular or interesting ones with my own comments about them.
RATING: One Smiley - Poor to Three Smileies - Excellent
www.citysearch.com 
If you want to be misled and find some bad restaurants, use this site. They've managed to gather the Web's most tasteless reviewers - which is really quite an achievement. Even their critics' reviews and ratings are useless. I was dumb enough to try a couple of those 9.5 places - now I don't even remember their names because they are so horrible.
www.dine.com
It's like a MySpace for restaurants. They've recently re-launched the site so it's easier to use and looks nicer than before, but it's STILL a bunch of people with no taste trying to rate restaurant experiences that could have nothing to do with their food. Popular restaurants, as usual, gets average rating but some terrible ones get good reviews. I can never understand the logic....
www.jatbar.com
I cannot believe these two guys actually had lunch at 637 restaurants (as of Apr 2006). The effort itself is worth applauding. Mostly cheap places - less than 10% are real restaurants for a sit-down dinner.
The writeups are detailed and entertaining to read, BUT ratings are downright useless. On a scale of 1 to 10, ALL restuarants are rated between 7 to 8, virtually making no distinction between a great place like Shalimar (8) and a terrible (and empty) restaurant like Banjara (7.25).
www.yelp.com
An interesting Citysearch. Most reviewers are young people and they are fun to read. Pretty useless for actually finding a good restaurant.
www.zagat.com
I like this site until they start charging. The concept is good, but in practice it will end up with same ratings as the ones you see on Citysearch. Also, since it has become real popular, the ratings are "diluted", which always happens when you have one or two idiots who decide to give Fleur de Lys one star for food just because his car got scratched while parked on the street.
www.gayot.com
Honestly, this guy's writeup and rating is not bad. At least he has the guts to rate some popular places real low. The biggest problem is the lack of details of his dining experience, and also all the ADs you'd see on this site. Man, I wonder if this is an experimental site to aggregate ALL possible styles of web ads - banner, sidebar, popup, google, you name it - in one place just to see how annoyed a reader can be.
www.sfgate.com
High quality, down to the point review with ratings that make sense - this is a website that I would visit to try to find a new restaurant to try. SF Chronicles has the guts to rate some very popular restaurants low - something you'll never see in those junk review sites. BTW, it's very SF-centric (for obvious reason), so if you're looking for a restaurant anywhere south of Palo Alto you need to select "Santa Clara".
www.michelin.com
HA HA, you wish. Go check out latest tire features, but no reviews here. The conservative folks on the other side of the Atlantic still print them in their little red covers. Good news though - A SF Bay Area edition has come out and you can see my review of it here.
