How reliable or useful are big food review sites like Tabelog

[dougiedd]

I find in the US that Yelp is most often wrong, although if you can identify a group of reviewers whose taste you trust you can use the site to some benefit.
Is Tablelog the same ?
Any good english review sites people trust. I used to think bento was ok but now not so.

I am in Tokyo.

[dougiedd]

thank you all

[jem589]

Tabelog is very reliable - especially for foreign food, in Tokyo. Japanese places are harder to gauge, especially at the low end. Scores definitely increase as price goes up - there's no separate scale for 'cheap and awesome' - so ramen and tonkatsu rarely crack the top ranks (but within their relative scales, the ordering is pretty good). Tabelog holds the scores down if there are a low number of reviews, which also negatively impacts smaller places. Outside Tokyo, not reliable (but I haven't used it in the other big cities) - the top places will often be bakeries and coffee and such.

There's one English site that I trust implicitly, but I'm biased.

[FourSeasons]

Tabelog has a rating on "CP", Skyliner told me that stands for "Cost-Performance" factor, the higher rating show better value but I am not sure the weighting of this criteria on the overall rating. It is not exactly "cheap and awesome" but I would think it is "good for value". It also has seperate "ramen" and "tonkatsu" categories so you can look at the ranking on those categories. I use Tabelog when I traveled to Hokkaido in the summer, and it is actually quite helpful too in small cities like Furano, Toya.

[mjgauer]

Jem could I ask you what the English site is that you refer to? My Japanese skills are lacking!

[lost squirrel]

Hah, I bet Jem is referring to his own food blog no?
I trust him too, he's shown me a few things when my office moved to his neck of the woods.

[jem589]

Nuts, I was back in the greater Philadelphia area for more than 2 weeks and forgot you were there. 'Nuts' was supposed to be an expression of dismay, by the way, not a 'squirrel' reference.

If you insist: http://iitokorone.blogspot.com/

The Tabelog Cost Performance rating (or indeed the Food, Atmosphere, Service and Drinks ratings) have never really caught my eye. I just go by the main score and find it pretty effective. Looking at the ramen scores, they're decent within themselves. I just struggle with the concept that fine dining is inherently better than cheap and awesome. Does it make sense that the #40 ramen gets an overall 3.7 while the #40 French gets almost 4.1 (which is very high, and I think not justified for Mona Lisa Ebisu, but that's another rant). It probably does, but I wish the top 10 or top 100 was a real cross-section of everything you can eat in Tokyo, and it's not. And actually the CP scores for the top ramen places are uniformly well below the CP scores for the top French places!

[Silverjay]

The scores are what they are. I just use them to identify good restaurants. You really need to read the reviews to get full use of the resource. Tabelog is great. Many excellent comments and photographs. Unlike Yelp, most people commenting are knowledgeable adults. For ramen, I prefer RamenDB. There was another great ramen database site, but it no longer seems to be up. Too bad. It had been around since the late 90's.

[edozanmai]

I think it is may be worth remembering that restaurants pay to be listed on Tabelog.

[Silverjay]

The comments and reviews are all candidly written so I don't think anything is being comprimised by their business model. Premium sponsored listings will appear at the top but they are always labeled.

[lost squirrel]

Ah, too bad. I'm working on finding the good spots here but people here tend to like really bad restaurants so it's a bit more difficult.