Zagat

and i started to work i like it and i met my wife here i left one wife and i i switched i switched wife every 25 years and then i you know i started to work of course in a restaurant so I became a manager, then I opened my own, then I started to do cooking classes, so I'm a culinary instructor.

With the restaurant, we achieved to be the Zagat guy, then I sold the restaurant, and I'm doing just now private event, and I'm doing videos.

So the first quarter of next year is gonna be my YouTube video.

I'm teaching.

decide? I decide, and you do what I say.

How do you decide? You know, whether it's the website adktaste.com, our weekly newsletter, or the podcast, the whole reason we started all of this is that we couldn't find a resource that was sort of like, and this is going to probably date me, sort of like the Zagat's Guide to the Adirondacks, which for people that remember, Zagat's was like the New York City restaurant bible.

And, you know, I think there are a lot of resources that are crowdsourced that will give you an idea of things you should do.

But we kind of wanted to be your best friend in the Adirondacks.

of talk through the foundation of that.

The annual report card we got was something called the Zagat Survey.

It would come out every year, you know, early November, something like that.

And the Zagat Survey was handed out to anyone who wanted to fill it out.

I think 20,000 people were voting in it.

And you had an opportunity to rate restaurants based on what you thought of their food, decor, and service.

And then Zagat would list the restaurants that had had the top 50 food scores, the top 50 decor, and the top 50 service scores.

And Zagat asked another question, which is, now name your five favorite restaurants in the city.

Official.

We're calling it Liberl Zagat.

You're very welcome for this.

So here's our setup.

So I've set it up to average out our individual scores for each category and then provide an overall score per restaurant.

And I've also set it up to reveal to us at the end who are the highest and lowest ranked in each category, as well as the overall winners.

Winners of the Zagat Guide of LaBelle.

Yes, we're also not necessarily following the exact formatting of any Zagat that's ever actually been put out.

Union Square Cafe started getting worse.

As a matter of fact, that was the one year that Union Square Cafe dropped in the Zagat survey rankings from New York's second favorite restaurant to New York's third favorite restaurant.

And my life was a shambles.

So I just kind of felt like a complete failure.

A virtuous cycle, one good thing leads to something even better.

And one of the things I've learned that we had been doing really, really well, as I said earlier, is hospitality.

With all those years, the reason I keep bringing up the Zagat survey is in those early years, we didn't have the internet.

And the only annual report card we got- in terms of how our restaurants are doing, because the New York Times restaurant reviewer would come in every couple, three, four years, but annually we would get a report card from the Zagat survey where 20,000 surveyors would say, here's what they thought of your food decor and service.

It's not Michelin.

It's some star rating service that's like Zagat.

Is that it? You know that one?

Yeah, I don't know who

They have Google Voice.

They've done service to make calls on your behalf already, like years and years ago with AI.

What is it? Zagat.

Zagat? Is that how you pronounce it?

He honed his craft under the late Chef Grey Coons at Café Grey, before becoming partner and beverage director at the Michelin-starred restaurant Marc Forgione in Tribeca.

Honored as one of Zagat's 30 Under 30 and as Star Chef's rising star sommelier, Matthew is nationally recognized as an expert on Syrah and holds a partnership at La Tablee.

In 2020, Matthew relocated to South Carolina and transformed a historic 1800s Charleston single house on Cumming Street into the Tipling House, an intimate living room style wine bar with daily hand-dated lists, an all-bottle, half-bottle pouring policy, rare cellar gems via Matthew's stash, and a focus on small-scale, site-specific winemakers.

And today we're discussing how to translate New York City fine dining rigor into a warm, low country context with

But it's...

I mean, again, don't take this guy like, you know, you're not looking at like the Zagat reviews or it's not, you know, whatever.

It's

not William Cooper.

Yeah.

Like, so restaurant guide Zagat at the time said that the dive thing was really annoying after the first time.

Yeah.

Like, the first time you're like, "Oh, ho-ho, lol," like everything's shaking, and win-