Would you like a Star rating displayed outside Restaurants?

No, it’s just one more route for corruption to occur, one more position of authority to be abused. Restaurants already have to be licensed and maintain a certain level of hygiene to operate, those that don’t are closed when they are found out. That’s good enough for me.

There already are star systems. Several of them. Although I think Zagat’s is the most famous. Anyone can avail themselves of information before they go out, or, if they have a fancy phone service, standing before the door. There’s no need for another such system, especially one that has to be approved by government officials.

I totally agree, this is the perfect example of a restaurant with a star diamond award certification, needless to say, it is my favorite place!

No. A cleanliness record is fine, but a subjective star rating as a mandatory thing would be bad. In any event, the good places typically highlight their reviews voluntarily.

We do this in Oregon. They don’t comment on the quality of food but the let you now about cleanliness.

[Post erased; rethinking my comment]

What if i’m on vacation and don’t know the area,got two kids with me and the missus all feeling ravenous and just drop in to the nearest place and we all go down with the shiites for a week.
It happens all the time a simple rating chart clearly displayed would allay any doubt and hopefully encourage all eateries to get the high rating for it’s catagory i.e. fastfood etc

But having the stars wouldn’t guarantee that you can’t get sick at that restaurant. All it takes is one employee not washing their hands after going to the bathroom who contaminates all your plates. What if the star evaluation was done when that employee was not working at the restaurant? Similarly, what happens when the restaurant is made aware of the problem and takes steps to fix it such as dismissing the employee, should their restaurant get a reduced star level then? There’s simply too many variables for a consistent star rating to work and have any serious meaning. That’s why before you go on vacation, you do research into what the local restaurants are, and you don’t go to ones that are ill-rated. Or you use your senses to decide if a restaurant seems too dirty to eat at.

Point taken.Too many variables.

Yelp.

If there is a Yelp.com website for your city, the site is easy to access by high-tech phone or computer and you can search for good places near by, read ratings and experiences, etc. I like it because you often get a fairly wide range of comments which means you aren’t relying on ONE person’s opinion.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they should have to, but those with high ratings usually do display their rating on their door or window and on their advertisement in the phone book.

In larger cities, a lot of the restaurants do display “Zagat Rated” signs in their windows, or “Best of [city name] 2007!” Once a few restaurants have done this, there’s increasing pressure on other restaurants to do the same.

If you’re on vacation and don’t know the area, something like Urbanspoon or Yelp or even a dead-tree guidebook to the area is probably sufficient.

(And the worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had—it wasn’t life threatening, except that I surely wished I would just die and get it over with—came from a highly-regarded restaurant, so even that’s no guarantee.)

Just so you all know, Yelp charges. Alot.

CHEERS for that link.

@Breed: That’s horrible!

Expanding on the too many variables theme…many cases of food poisoning that occurr in restaurants don’t originate at the restaurant. Commonly, the food is contaminated at the source or somewhere down the line before it ever gets to the restaurant(the processing plant, during shipping, etc.)

Yes I would but corruption would prevail and it would not be reliable.

The question was really intended to give the consumer an idea of the quality of the establishment they were entering,i.e. if given a 5 star then the place should not be a 1 star when you walk in,it may not be 5 star but if it’s 3or4 when you get in at least you aint going to be that disappointed.

Uh… I work for yelp, and most of the info on that page, BM, is misconstrued.

I did not write that page, but some of what it reports is similar to experiences I’ve had with Yelp at two, separate businesses.
The wine shop is a small neighborhood shop with extremely loyal customers. All our customer reviews were never anything but positive. Suddenly we were contacted by Yelp and asked if we wanted to upgrade (pay a premium) to some “gold” plan which would benefit us by allowing us to blah, blah, blah…
We politely declined since we really don’t have an ad or PR budget. All our exposure comes from the many, many charitable donations the store makes and hopefully the event is nice enough to mention us in their programing material. Seriously, we hardly ever refuse a donation request.
Soon after we decline to “upgrade”, customer posted reviews start disappearing from our listing. It was actually our loyal customers who notified us of this. I guess they went looking to read their review and saw it was gone. We chalked it up to computer glitches or whatnot. We’re really easygoing guys. Whatever…
Fast forward six months. We get another sales call form yelp and again decline to upgrade, but this time we watch the site. Postings go missing a mere hour after we decline to “upgrade”. It was like they were strong-arming us, saying “Look what we can do if you don’t pay.”

Del, I have the utmost respect for you and believe you wouldn’t work for an organization that operated this way. But I thought I’d let it be known that in other parts of the country Yelp does aparently operate this way. Plus I don’t think that most people know that the website charges businesses anything, ever. I, myself had assumed it was a free listing site that made money from ad banners and such.