Facing the judging challenge

By The Standard | Aug. 4, 2013

Last Saturday, the Zimbabwe on a Plate Judging Panel for both 2012 and 2013 gathered for their Great Debates.

By Rosie Mitchell

Judging the competition has for its duration been an incredibly difficult task and this session was certainly no exception. It is hard enough to tackle the decisions and discussions required to adjudicate for one year’s worth of finalists.

When it’s a double whammy, it’s even more difficult, as each year, must be dealt with separately and what eventually gets decided upon for the one year must not influence decisions made for the next year.

Judges are also reviewers, and some have been involved since the inception of the competition in its current format. The plan, of course, was to wrap up the mind-bending conundrums and rather agonising decision-making processes involved in selecting winners — the best of the best and cream of the crop — by lunch time, and then settling to the team’s last chance in their reviewing and judging roles, to socialise together, over food and wine.

Of course, this was not to be — for once again, the process took an entire day — though there was a brief break for lunch!

It’s hardly surprising that the task should prove difficult. Trying to find the worthy winners among restaurants who rated five plates is very tricky indeed, since they have all scored highly and received glowing reports from reviewers.

What has been very interesting over the years of Zim on a Plate (Zoap), however, has been observing the new names that have popped up in lights on the finalists and award winners list from year to year, showing that no one can rest on their laurels, and that each year’s list is bound to bring some surprises. In the early days of the competition, some names regularly recurred as finalist and award-winning establishments — yet some of these in later years sometimes lost their five plate ratings — often to win these back the following year, or the year after.

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Herein lies the tale of the drama and the perceived tragedy of the four plate rating! Many excellent restaurateurs have reacted to the news of a lost plate with feelings of devastation and despair, which have then been relayed in one way or another, to the sponsors and the competition management.

Our plucky and resourceful restaurant trade is made up of artists, for the best cuisine is also art. Such people are passionate, hard working, very creative and certainly, they are perfectionists, as has been observed over the years of Zoap. For these qualities, they thoroughly deserve applause.

The review team and those of us managing the competition, knowing full well just how proud are our restaurateurs of their craft, profession and achievements, have often felt downhearted on sending through a four plate rated review for publication — not, because a four plate rating is remotely bad: Not at all! A four plate rating is very good indeed. It means a score of between 80% and 89% of possible marks was attained, and this is most certainly not to be sneezed at! Downhearted, because we know full well just how gutted the recipient is likely to feel, given the level of perfectionism in the trade. Yet, if studying the ratings and finalists and award winners over the years, it can be clearly seen, with just a very few exceptions, most five plate rated establishments have also at times received a four plate rating, at least once and sometimes more than once. This illustrates a point so often made over the years on these pages: While every attempt has been made with Zoap to achieve the highest level of objectivity and fairness that can be achieved — by appointing a changing team of anonymous reviews who are nothing more than ordinary diners-out drawn from a cross-section of Zimbabwean society, and devising and refining detailed score sheets in each entry category — nonetheless, this is never going to be an exact science. Even with these procedures and checks and balances in place, and even with a standard practice whenever a restaurant has dropped from a five to a four plate rating, of contacting the reviewer and discussing the score sheet and review in detail, to ensure the drop in rating fully makes sense in the context of how the competition is run — this small variation of ratings is simply bound to happen over the years. Why? Because, a restaurant cannot possibly always deliver absolute perfection every single day of the year, and the competition has never had the resources to review entrants more than once annually. Both restaurateur and reviewer are human beings. The former has a very stressful and demanding role to play and everything cannot always go perfectly. The latter, being human, brings to the dining table in the restaurant, all the individual personality traits, tastes, likes, dislikes, that any other diner drawn from the general public also brings there.

Whilst reviewers have been selected over the years very carefully so that they are as representative of that general dining public as is possible, being human, they cannot possibly all be expected to view the world, and dining out, and cuisine in general, exactly the same way as each other and accordingly review and rate restaurants with the precision of scientists or mathematicians.

The public itself is not homogenous, individuals vary vastly in taste and preference, like and dislike, and ZOAP from the outset aimed to provide really useful information for both the dining public and for the restaurant trade, by creating review teams from a cross section of people who dine out a lot.

This way, reviews and ratings were more likely to reflect the views of the public at large, thereby giving both service provider and client an accurate reflection of perceptions on which to base judgements.

For the public, reading the reviews and looking at the plate rating has provided valuable information as to which restaurant is likely to suit their own particular needs, tastes and preferences.

For those in the trade, the idea has always been, to show them clearly, how the dining experience they offer is perceived by an ordinary member of the dining-out public — those people most likely to walk through their door and have a meal.

Because, in pleasing such people, trade should be boosted, and in being shown what is liked, and what is not, via the reviews, improvements and changes to attract and retain trade can then be made.

This is constructive criticism — useful information — and this has been a sponsored competition, and an expensive one to sustain, through which the sponsors have shown their support of the restaurant trade, which forms an important part of their client base in each case.

Some of these points have been missed by entrants in the competition. Viewing a drop from five to four plates as a complete disaster is something of a misinterpretation of the aims of the competition and the desire of the sponsors to assist the trade in maintaining excellent standards, and it has been sad to observe how badly this can be taken.

The reality of life is that not everyone can be a winner all the time, and none of us can achieve perfection every single day, much as we would all strive for it. With all of this as a background, it can be imagined just how tough a job the judges have had each year, and just how tough it was this time around, choosing winners from two years’ worth of Finalists.

In addition to selecting the Restaurant of the Year in each of the seven entry categories for both 2012 and 2013, from several excellent five plate rated contenders in each case, the judges also had to choose the Most Imaginative Menu in each category for each year and the overall best wine list for both years.

This required closely perusing the menus and wine lists of a large number of finalists. In addition, there are the Awards of Excellence and for the Most Imaginative Dining Experience to bestow, plus, the Service Personality of the Year.

All in all, the Judges had their work fully cut out for them! Thankfully, however, decisions were eventually settled upon to the satisfaction of the full panel. By end of day, there were some very tired but pleased judges; they were a little sad, too, as this was the last such session, and the team has greatly enjoyed its work for ZOAP.

Then, it was time to enjoy a glass of wine, though little energy was left to make an evening of it, and judges headed off home quite swiftly!