CL review process
January 21st, 2008 by Besha Rodell in Food media, RestaurantsNot to quibble, but to clarify (I do love the opportunity to clarify), I wanted to explain our process in light of a comment made on my recent MF Buckhead review. A reader commented, in response to my complaints about some service issues, “You also forget to mention that this restaurant has only been open a couple of months and I have no doubt that your review was done in its very early days.”
We do have a policy regarding how long we wait before a review can be done. Often, my colleague Cliff Bostock will do a first look at a restaurant right after it opens, but we always make sure to say that it is a first look, not a formal review. For the formal review, I wait a month before I even set foot in the place. I visit multiple times, spread out over the course of a couple of weeks. It is not a perfect system, but we strive to find a balance between fairness to the new restaurant and getting our review out there in a timely manner. However, I would never write a review based on experiences had in the first few weeks of operation.
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