Until recently whenever I went out for dinner I checked out IENS, the largest restaurant site in The Netherlands. 53.000 registered tasters rate the restaurants they have had lunch or dinner at. I have been disappointed often as the restaurants could not live up to the expectations I had after checking them on IENS.
Some time ago I had dinner at Fellini in Amsterdam. Back then it was rated with an 8,1 (on a scale from 1 – 10). Now it is rated slightly higher. The food was decent but not worth an 8 or up. Last month I had dinner at Rozemarijn in Maastricht, which is rated at IENS with an 8,8. Rozemarijn comes close to a Michelin rating. The food really is superb.
Afterwards I could not get over the fact that the difference in quality and service didn’t reflect the difference in ratings. I would think that a 7,1 for Fellini would be more appropriate. I felt that there is a flaw in the IENS system. The idea of letting tasters rate the restaurants is great, but how should one value the rating of the individual taster?
What I mean by that is if I would only eat at restaurants with a Michelin star (I wish!) and would rate them with an 8, a restaurant like Fellini would never get an 8. The same works the other way around. If you always eat at restaurants like Fellini and grade them with an 8, a restaurant like Rozemarijn would be close to a 10. If every restaurantgoer would stay in ‘their segment’ it would not be a problem. But consumers tend to be quite heterogeneous these days, and not behaving as the companies would like or expect them to.
On their website IENS states that the ratings the restaurants receive are the average of the individual rates of the tasters. I think it is too one-dimensional and the rates should be calculated another way, somehow taking the tasters’ profile into account. Resulting in more realistic ratings and not raising expectations the restaurants cannot live up to. In turn resulting in me not checking IENS anymore as I do not consider their information reliable.
