Internet giant Google shelled out some $151 million to acquire venerable restaurant rater  Zagat Survey this past fall. The deal brought Google a whole slew of reviews and other handy dining information for its users' daily searches. Ah, but, what to do with all those antiquated skinny red guidebooks? How bout a fire sale? Over [...]

Iconic restaurant guide Zagat Survey has been acquired by Internet search giant Google, the New York Times reports. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. [UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal pegs the purchase price at around $125 million.] But survey founders Tim and Nina Zagat cheekily awarded the transaction a full 30 points on their [...]

The Village Voice directs our attention to this cutesy Zagat Buzz video demonstrating the various types of annoying restaurant patrons and their ordering habits. Which order type are you?

Not even the lobster truck could compete with Five Guys Last week was one for the record books, thanks to the baffling whims of the interwebs. A four-paragraph item about Five Guys topping the hamburger category in the 2010 Zagat fast food survey went viral, generating tens of thousands of hits and causing our poor [...]

While reporting out this week's column on the 2011 Zagat guide, I talked to Michael Landrum, who's something of a student of the biennial survey. He surprised me early in our conversation when he said: Ray’s the Steaks never deserved to be a 27-rated restaurant, as much as I’d like to say this, but it [...]

I want to talk about restaurant reviews for a minute — your reviews.  Diners have power, and you've had it for as long as anyone has cared about Zagat ratings. But with the proliferation of sites as far-ranging (and far-reaching) as Yelp and Urbanspoon, not to mention personal blogs, your ability to make noise has [...]

Earlier today I did something that's all too easy in this steal-information-wherever-you-like era: I cribbed a factoid from a June 15 item on Zagat (itself likely drawn from WaPo's report from a year ago) about Hill Country's opening date in D.C. It turns out to be incorrect. Mea culpa! I should say that I did [...]

That's right, it's time again for the annual biennial Zagat survey to determine the metro area's best restaurants — or at least the metro area's best restaurants that you could be bothered or cajoled or threatened or enticed to rate from the past year. Yep, even though the surveys are conducted every two years, Zagat asks you [...]

Y&H will give you three guesses as to what the most-read post was this week. Two of them won't count. That's right, once again, a certain low-cal product from Bud leads the pack, for the umpteenth week in a row. This is the dark side of search-engine optimization. Budweiser Launches Select 55, Light Beer Arms [...]

As Y&H bids farewell to the Zagat era in this week's cover story, I'd like to recall this hilarious SNL sketch in which the late, great Chris Farley was so funny as a matronly, oblivious wife that Adam Sandler could barely keep it together.