THE SCORING Zagat questionnaires ask participants to rate restaurants on food, decor and service on a scale of 0 to 3, in which 3 means excellent, 2 very good, 1 good and 0 "fair-poor." The scores are averaged, then multiplied by ten for the final rating. This is one of the oddest features of the Zagat system; the 0-to-30 scale implies a great deal more nuance than there is in the 0-to-3 scale from which the ratings are extrapolated. (Tim and Nina Zagat, creators of the Zagat surveys, say they "eliminate the decimal point" for the sake of simplicity.)

THE PRICES Another peculiarity of the guides is the cost column in each entry, which represents "surveyors' estimated price of a dinner with one drink and tip." Though the cost of a meal would seem to be a matter of fact rather than opinion, the figure given by Zagat is the average of respondents' guesses.

DETERMINING THE BEST The "best" restaurant in an area is the one that heads the list called "Top 50 Food Rankings" in the front of each guide. Zagat uses unpublished decimal points to rank restaurants from highest to lowest. For example, seven restaurants in New York earned a 28 for food. First-place Le Bernardin is at the high end of the 28 range—say, 28.4—while seventh-place Daniel is at the low end, somewhere around 27.6. Places rated by fewer than 100 respondents are excluded from the top-50 list.