TTT
Interviewee:  Tim Zagat
Interviewer:  Judith Weinraub					      New York City
Date:  December 3, 2009

Q:  This is Judith Weinraub.  I’m with Tim Zagat in his office on Columbus Circle.  It is December 3, 2009.  Good afternoon.

Zagat:  Good to be with you.

Q:  Why don’t we start with your telling me a little something about where and when you were born, how you grew up, your education, anything you feel.

Zagat:  I was born on May 13, 1940, before the Second World War had started, at least to the United States.  My mother and father were both New Yorkers and had grown up in New York.  My mother was originally from Alabama, in Montgomery, Alabama.  My father was originally from New York City.  My parents agreed on virtually nothing, but they negotiated everything.  My father wanted to have a son named after him, and so my real name is Eugene Henry Zagat, Jr., but my mother said that she wanted to be able to scream at us both and have us know who was being screamed at, so she said that she wanted to have the choice of my nickname.  So I was born Eugene formally, but my first week of life I was Nick Zagat.  That didn’t stick, at least with her, and then the second week I was Henry or Hank, and the third week of life I became Tim Zagat and that was that.
	I grew up on Central Park West at 94th Street, in apartment 10F, and I haven’t gone very far since then because I still live on Central Park West in another building but also in apartment 10F.  When I was a little boy, I first went to Alexander Robertson School, which was just a charming really miniscule school.

Q:  I don’t know what that is.

Zagat:  It’s a church school, first Scotch Presbyterian, I think, or anyway, church school.  It was right on 95th Street, and I started when I was two years old and loved it.  My sister started two years later, when she was two years old.  We would go out to Central Park and had all kinds of good times in the park and loved it.
My parents didn’t like the same things when it came to where to live.  My father liked New York City, so we lived in New York for about five months a year, and my mother liked Stamford, Connecticut, where we had a house, we lived there for five months a year.  My mother liked exotic trips, so we would go to places like Guatemala and Haiti, and my father liked non-exotic trips where he could sit and read and eat, so we would go to places that were very comfortable when it was his month.  But we did travel more than, I think, most people.
	When I was starting fourth grade, I went to Riverdale Country School up in Riverdale in the Bronx, and I went there because my grandfather had been the classmate and friend of the headmaster who founded the school, a fellow named Frank Hackett.  Frank Hackett was the headmaster for three years when I was there, from fourth to sixth grade, then it was three more years before he died.  He was a presence.  Frank Hackett could out-sing the entire school.  We used to have daily chapel and I got a lot of religion, not specific religion, but a lot of “Be good, think of others,” you know.  All of the kind of moral things were beat into you again and again and again, to, I think, everyone’s benefit.  At the time I wasn’t aware how much good it did me, but I think it has done me a lot of good throughout my life.  Riverdale is a great school, and I was there for nine years.

Q:  Do you remember what the food was like?

Zagat:  The food was very mundane, very mundane.  Chicken à la King was a highpoint in the—nobody thought the food was particularly good at Riverdale at that time.
Anyway, I was trying to think of what other things my parents disagreed about.  I think everything.

Q:  Did they disagree about food?

Zagat:  Yes, they did.  My father liked to go to restaurants, and in those days the food in New York, the best restaurants might have grilled chicken, steak, potatoes, no green vegetables in the wintertime, no fresh berries, of course, from October until May.  It was a very limited menu and there were not very many different types of cuisine.  In fact, in 1979, when we started our survey, there were about twenty different nationalities in New York, and today we count over a hundred.  So in a thirty-year period it’s gigantic.

Q:  Makes a big difference.

Zagat:  I’d be happy to talk about that change, if you’d like.

Q:  We can get to that.

Zagat:  Food was not the strong point at Riverdale.  There were a lot of other wonderful things about it, very good athletics, and it got me into Harvard, or, at least, I thought maybe it had something to do with it.  Seven out of thirty-five people in our class went to Harvard, and several of us roomed together and we have remained lifelong friends.  Our class reunions are kind of amazing in terms of the percentage of people who come back.  Anyway, I played a variety of sports at Riverdale.
My mother liked to cook, or at least she—

Q:  I was going to say, a good thing or a bad thing?

Zagat:  It was not a very good thing, and I would only say this since she is no longer going to come back and hit me over the head, but she does have a presence.  I mean, every time I say something like this, I have a feeling she’s sitting behind me saying, “Oh, Tim.  Oh, Tim.”
My father and my grandfather liked to go out to eat in the best restaurants that exist in New York, and there was some pretty good—the Pavillon and the Café Chauveron and Café Arnold and Tony Soma’s.  Tony Soma’s was the—what’s the actress?  Anyway, I can’t remember.  She was Nicholson’s girlfriend and has been in all kinds of movies.  Anyway, she was a daughter of the Somas.
My father would have us go out as much as possible, and maybe that’s because he knew what my mother’s cooking was like.  She thought that pretty much everything should be frozen first, and that food wasn’t safe unless it had been frozen, and she didn’t think just anybody knew how to freeze.  She wanted somebody with a lot of experience, and therefore she thought A & P had more experience freezing more things, so that’s where she went for her frozen things.  She would make a Thanksgiving dinner and have ten pounds of turkey left and she’d freeze it, and then that would be the 1955 turkey, and the 1957 ham would go into the freezer too.  Then she would, in 1961, discover the six-year-old ham and turkey, she would pull them out, heat them up, put them in a casserole, pour in mushroom soup or onion soup or both, beat them around, and she would be very proud of her casserole.  She did this for parties and she did it too often for us alone.
So the main question I had when I met Nina and she started cooking food for us was, “How old is it?”  She never understood why I was so upset, but, I mean, it was, “How old is it?”
	We used to very often, particularly when we were in Stamford, Connecticut, there was a good pizza place called Mario’s on High Ridge Road, and we would leave the table—this was when we were old enough to drive, which is sixteen—leave the table immediately, go down to Mario’s to get some food, to get some pizza.
	Anyway, I was at Harvard and had four wonderful years and played soccer and generally had a lot of fun, learned more from my classmates than I did any other way.  Then I got out of college and I was elected Vice President of the United States National Student Association, which is a long story, but I traveled for four years speaking at colleges all over the United States, and I went to 197 colleges to speak, and it was a very interesting year.  I was talking about student government activities and insurance and civil and student rights.

Q:  What was the purpose of the organization?

Zagat:  It was an association of student governments at approximately 300 colleges and universities.  It had held 330 or 340, but with the Civil Rights Movement, the southern schools withdrew.  The purpose of the organization, dependent on who you asked, it was basically to cooperate among schools and student governments, but there were certain people like Tom Hayden and Students for a Democratic Society who were wanting it to be very political, and it just, by coincidence, happened that the CIA, which I didn’t even know was involved, was funding a large part of its activities because they wanted it to be political.  It call came out after my tenure, in a big article about it in Ramparts magazine.  But the CIA was supporting a lot of youth organizations, youth and labor, and they wanted to have stands taken that they could go to international student congresses and talk to the outs around the world, and make contact with them and maintain communication, and also on the possibility that somebody would get elected president of Algeria, which, in fact, happened, they wanted to have people who knew them from the United States’ government perspective.
So in my first year at NSA, was there as a freshman, I came out against our taking a position in favor of Algerian independence.  I said, “We are not elected student government leaders, so we’re not elected to take stands like this.”  Turns out, the CIA wanted us to take stands like that because it made it possible for them to have connections, and we were actually funding something like fifty to a hundred Algerian so-called students, but people had been injured in the fighting and they were in the United States under our auspices being treated.
	So there were lots of other—for example, the same thing was true for Cuba.  They wanted to have some people who were their people, who actually knew what the hell was going on in Cuba.  Now, it’s a rational thing for the CIA.  It was strange—[former Washington Post reporter and editor] Bob Kaiser knows all about this because he was involved, but you didn’t expect the CIA to be coming over your left shoulder.  You would have expected them to come over your right shoulder, at least I thought they would be to the right of us.  They were actually way to the left, and they wanted to encourage political action.  I was opposed to that, and I ran for president of NSA and lost by twenty-five votes out of two thousand or so, and was saying we should allocate our efforts to strictly student rights on campus, civil rights in the United States, insurance, getting good insurance for college students, and doing a lot of things that the AARP, for example, does for elderly people.  We should have been working to make students’ lives better and get more scholarships and stuff like that.  My candidacy, which I lost, as I said, my campaign manager was [Massachusetts congressman] Barney Frank, and it was my last campaign and his first.

Q:  Was he in the organization as well?

Zagat:  Yes, he was in the organization.  Anyway, he’s a great friend of mine for many, many years.

Q:  He’s a wonderful guy, yes.

Zagat:  I think he’s great.  But then after that I went to the Peace Corps, and shortly after I got there, Bill Moyers called me and said, “We have some problems.  I’d like you to do a little study on them.” 

Q:  Were you scheduled to go overseas at that point?

Zagat:  I was supposed to be in Washington.  I was on staff.  Anyway, he said, “We’re ordering the same reading materials four or five times over,” and the people who handle the finances kept on seeing the same books being bought for different operations repetitively.  So I went around and talked to everybody and found out it was just lack of coordination.  So I wrote a short memo saying activities need to be coordinated, at least at this level, and he said, “Would you take charge of it?”
	I said, “Boy, yeah.”  So I became head of the Book Coordination Office of the Peace Corps.  We published thirty-four books out of three different countries, mostly taking American textbooks and turning them into the local idiom, instead of saying “Plug into the wall,” saying “Clip onto the battery” and things like that.  Instead of Joey White and Cecilia Brown playing in the snow, it became Joseph Inugu and, you know, just making it feel more appropriate to the particular countries.
We had Peace Corps CARE packages of books.  The major thing is we had what were called book lockers.  They were really trunks, metal trunks, and we would supply each volunteer with a full trunk of books, half of which related to the volunteer’s job and half relating to having something to do in the bush, where you didn’t have television by way of entertainment.  I had to pick all of those books and make sure that they got all over the world.  Over time we changed the way these things were packaged, and found some very strong cardboard that was amazingly much stronger than the trunks.  I picked thousands of books because we were working with different people in different places.  Shriver had said he was going to get a million books for Africa before I arrived.

Q:  This is Sargent Shriver.

Zagat:  Yes.  He had stimulated every women’s club in America to go in the closets and in the attics and get books and ship them to us, and we had no place really where we could put them.  I had to arrange to get that all sorted out.  Ninety percent of the books were totally useless, and it was just a mass of stuff.  We had some people in Washington who sorted it all out, and we sent a million books to South Africa, I think it was, or Nigeria.  We sent some books that were useful, but we probably had gone through ten million books before we came up with the million.
	Anyway, there was a lot of stuff, and I was a young person and I was put on the senior staff of the Peace Corps, which was really exciting.  I would see Shriver every day and I’d see Bill Moyers.  Bill only told me recently, but he got me a huge jump in my civil service rating, because I wouldn’t have been allowed to do this job if I didn’t have a CS-15 or something, and I started with CS-5 or CS-6, and I don’t know what he did, but it sure was good for my economy.
	So anyway, I got through that, and my mother was saying, “This is wonderful.  Stay down.”  And my father said, “If you want me to pay for law school, you go now.”  So I then was lucky enough to get into Yale law school and was lucky enough to be asked to sit next to a young lady named Nina Safronoff, who was a very good cook.

Q:  Back up a little bit.  Was law school an inevitable choice for you?

Zagat:  No, but I had originally thought I wanted to be a politician, and it seemed to me that law school was the best place to go for that.  I never did become a politician because I began to realize all of the difficulties, that, first of all, somebody wants to kick your teeth in every two years, and not only your teeth, but your family’s.  Number two, you have to raise money from your friends in order to give it to television stations.  Number three, you have to do this work at night and on weekends, when everybody else wants to be with their family, including me.  Number four, I figured I had too thin skin.  I just didn’t like the nastiness of politics these days, at least for quite a long time.
	So anyway, I went to Yale law school, where I was assigned to sit next to Nina Safronoff, and we started studying together with a group with a few friends.  The most distinguished of them was a guy named Walter Dellinger, who became Solicitor General of the United States, I think.  He’s still a friend of ours.  Nina and I started studying more and more, and all these women I used to date sort of disappeared.  After the first year of law school, I guess the beginning of the second year, it seemed to me we were always together.  Then I called her mother and asked her mother if she could arrange a wedding on short notice, four weeks, and her mother asked me the logical question, “Is there something urgent that we need to know about?”
	I said, “No, it has nothing to do with that.”  I think everything I do, I like to do quickly, and I’m not a person who’s very deliberate.  Once I get going, fixated on something, I’m very stay-with-it-and-go.
Anyway, so her mother said, “How about six weeks?”
	I said, “That’s fine.”
Then I called my parents to tell them that we were getting married, and that was when Nina walked in and found out that she was getting married.  You have to understand that you should never propose to somebody unless you know that they want to get married.  I knew she wanted to get married, so why bother proposing?

Q:  So her mother knew before?

Zagat:  Her mother knew before she did, but she knew.  She knew.  I know she knew.  She knew that I wanted to get married, and I knew that she wanted to get married, and you didn’t need to say anything, so I didn’t.  Why waste time?
	So anyway, we were married just after spring vacation in our second year of law school, and we went that summer for three months in Europe.  We bought a car in Wolfsburg, Germany, a brand-new Volkswagen Squareback, and we slept in the back, had air mattresses, and we drove all over Europe, and we did the same thing the next year, after the bar exam.
	But as for food, Nina is a really good cook.  She wasn’t doing the Jill [Julie Powell] routine, you know, Jill and Julia.  She didn’t cook everything in Julia’s cookbook, but she did a fair share.  Nina liked Craig Claiborne, I think, and whatever she was doing, I thought it was a hell of a lot better than what I was used to growing up.
After we were out of law school and through the bar exam, she joined Sherman & Sterling and I joined Hughes Hubbard & Reed.

Q:  So you took the New York bar?

Zagat:  Yes.  Charles Evans Hughes, who had been Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and also ran for president of the United States against Wilson.  So we were there, and almost about a year later or maybe less than a year, I was asked if I’d like to go to Paris.  I thought that was a great idea, but then we had to negotiate Nina’s going.  Her firm was so conservative, they would never have let a woman go abroad, except for the fact that their conservativism played in our favor.  They would never separate a husband and a wife.  So she went and said, “My husband’s going to Europe and I don’t want to be left alone here.”
	They said, “Oh, Nina, dear, you go to Paris too.”  So on the basis of their conservatism, she got to be the first woman to go to the Paris office of Sherman & Sterling.  I happened to be the first male to go to the new Paris office of Hughes Hubbard & Reed, which was a much smaller office; it had three lawyers in it at the time.
We had two kind of blissful years of, number one, trying to take advantage of being in Paris and reading Hemingway’s Moveable Feast.  We really tried every second weekend to go somewhere that was interesting, and caught a plane or got a train and traveled a lot.  We also ate a lot, and had an incredible budget for eating out because the senior partner in our office didn’t like to take people out as much as he would have normally have to, so he would assign less important people to us to take out, which was very nice.  So we were eating on the firm in a way that nobody in New York ever would have.
Nina went to the Cordon Bleu and ultimately became the lawyer for the Cordon Bleu, and learned a lot of new things about food.  She was doing a good job of French food and American food.
Finally, somebody set us up with a Chinese housekeeper, who was unbelievable in every way.  She couldn’t speak a word of English or French, but to give you an idea, the first day she came in and we couldn’t talk, she was with the family, the Chinese family that she was with, and he said, “You’re not going to need to talk to her.”
	Nina and I were saying, “We’ve got to talk to her.”
But the first day she cleaned everything, every window, every glass.  You name it.  The house was spotless in a way that it had never been when we were first there.  The next day, she went through all of my clothes, and everything was sewn, everything was put into the closet just neatly, anything that needs to be pressed was pressed.  And the third day she started producing Chinese food, and our icebox was always full of egg rolls and things that were delicious.  She was a fine cook.  So we had French food, we had American food, we had Chinese food, and we had a very good diet.
	When we came back to New York around 1970, shortly after that, we joined a food and wine group.  We had about twenty friends that would eat and drink once a month, and we had some very good meals, but we were essentially just a bunch of friends.

Q:  What were food and wine groups like then?

Zagat:  You know, I don’t know.  I was only a member of that one, and we had a wonderful group of friends.

Q:  You’d go out or someone would cook?

Zagat:  One time we’d go out and we’d plan and we’d bring all of our wines, and we’d have, for example, Aubrillon, ten vintages, you’d have Lafite, Latour, Aubrillon of one year, so that you could do interesting tastings.  Also the people would cook at home, and Nina would do a dinner and it would be really a blowout meal.  Each of us sort of shared the costs and passed it around, the work.
	We called this thing the Downtown Wine Tasting Association, which was really dignifying a group of friends who ate and drank a lot.  We were at one of our dinners and the person who was most active at the time was Ivan Karp, who is the owner of OK Harris Gallery, and he was the number two guy to Leo Castelli, so he was a big deal art dealer.  Ivan is outspoken when he is sober, and he was not particularly sober that day.  He was probably on his tenth or twelfth glass of wine, and he sailed into the then critic of a particular newspaper that is too powerful to mention even now.  Anyway, he really said basically that half the time he didn’t agree at all.
I’d done political surveying before, and Nina actually had worked too.  I said, “Why don’t we do a survey of our friends who we think would enjoy it, people who eat out a lot, and who like to talk about food?”  We all had pads of paper in front of us, yellow pads, legal, and I said, “Everybody write down ten names of people you think would enjoy being surveyed on the top restaurants in New York,” and they did.  After a couple months, we did a survey of two hundred people on a hundred restaurants.  And that’s what it looked like, that’s the questionnaire and that’s the results.  Everybody liked the results so much, they all asked for ten more copies.  The deal was if you participate, you get one copy for free.  So even though nobody had ever heard of user-generated content, that is user-generated content.

Q:  I see those columns.  They must represent—

Zagat:  Ratings.

Q:  Was it divided into, I don’t know like—

Zagat:  Food, décor, service, cost, and cleanliness.  We eliminated cleanliness after a while.  The results were two sides of a fourteen-inch page of paper, and everybody seemed to like it and we got more and more requests for it.  People would say, “Would you send over enough copies for my law firm?”  The second year was five hundred people, and the third year was a thousand, and we raised the number of restaurants.  In the second year it was two hundred, and the third year it was three hundred and fifty.

Q:  Who put all that together?

Zagat:  Me and Nina, and I had secretaries who would help me, being paid to stay late.  But the third year got to be so complicated and expensive that we decided to sell copies and try to make our hobby tax-deductible, and that was Nina’s input because she’s a tax lawyer, and she hates using after-tax money for anything.  So she said, “At least let’s make our hobby less expensive by being deductible, and also if people like it so much, let’s ask them to pay for what they say they like.”  And that was the first year we did it as a book, and we broke even that year, which was never in our wildest imagination.  That article up there was the first review by a newspaper of what we did, and we were very pleased that the newspapers didn’t kill us, that they kind of accepted the idea that we were doing this.

Q:  Like a book review?

Zagat:  Yes, it was sort of a book review.  This writer was Arthur Schwartz, who was very well known, the critic for the Daily News.  He was saying that for a lot of reasons our survey avoided some of the pitfalls of the individual critic, bad days either on the part of the critic or on the part of the restaurant, taste preferences that didn’t necessarily represent everybody, limited number of visits that were possible for the critic because the critic hits the restaurant in the middle of the summer and it may be very different from in the middle of the winter.
Gradually we learned that there were some analytic reasons why what had been our original thought was just inchoate, that if you had a large number of people and you had the right people, you were going to get better results than one person, and that the results should be easy to use.  Therefore, we designed the book, which everybody said it’s going to be terrible, it’s going to get lost in the shelves.  We said, “It’s not going to be in the shelves; we’re going to put it at the cash register.”  People said, “Ha, ha, ha, you can’t get in the cash register.”  Well, we did.

Q:  How did you synthesize what you wanted to be in those reviews?  How much space did you—

Zagat:  They’re very much about the length of our current reviews.  We wanted to touch all the bases, food, décor, service and cost, and who goes there, and basically give as succinct a view of the restaurant as possible, but to do it synopsizing what a large number of other people were saying, not our own point of view, but what hundreds of people were saying.  The whole idea was that you’re better off if you have hundreds.  So the reviews were meant to be short.  These things were meant to go into somebody’s pocket of a jacket or a pocketbook.  We really kind of designed it to meet our own needs, and we also asked all of our surveyors to please tell us what they would like us to do and how they would like us to do it, constantly asking people to share their point of view with us, and we really pay attention to it.
	I think the two kind of major things that we really did that were different are, one, most media has always been a one-way street, and the people doing it are—this is not a criticism, but I mean their satisfaction in some ways, they get smart, they learn about a subject and they tell you, and if they’re good enough, you pay for their knowledge.  But it has never been a two-way street until very recently.

Q:  What was out there at that point?  Obviously, there were the restaurant reviews in the newspapers and I guess New York Magazine.

Zagat:  There was New York Magazine and I think Gael Greene was doing it then, and for a long time the New York Times had Craig Claiborne, who I’m proud to say I have a letter from him on the wall, saying that we love what we did.  New York Magazine did a huge feature.  That’s the cover, the folded cover, which was called “Food Spooks.”  So the people you might have thought were competitive treated us with, I think, kindness and support at the time.
	Anyway, we went to every publisher that we could find.  Oh, I remember what I was saying.  One is the two-way street.  We started out by listening to other people, rather than telling them.  We packaged what they had and then sold it back to them.  The other thing that was unique about what we did, we used surveying techniques.  We’ve always had surveying serving sellers, you know, “You should change the color of your package,” and all kinds of surveys that have been done for a long time for the benefit of sellers, to identify the interests of the buyer and how the buyer was reacting to their products.  We turned it around and we did it for the benefit of the buyer.  Now it happens, incidentally, that all of our surveys are giving the sellers free-market studies of their customers’ attitudes, and if a restaurant gets twenty-four for food and sixteen for service, that’s the same people saying the service is not as good.  The restaurants that understand that use it, and many do to this day.  In fact, people pay their staffs partly if they do better on our ratings in particular ways.  So those are two fundamentally different things.
	We happened to be doing this at a time which was sort of catching the wave of increasing public interest in food, and some fundamental demographic changes, which I either will write a book about one day or will pay somebody else to write a book about, but just a lot of basic changes that account for the revolution in food that we have.  Some of the simplest ones are jet travel, which came in in the sixties, but it was several decades before most middle-class people had ever traveled anywhere.  But as people traveled more, they got more exposed to better food, and a lot of people now knew what French food really tastes like by having gone to France, and Italian food in Italy.  So we educated our audience by that change.
	The second major change with jet travel was we were able to bring in—and packaging that would accompany it—ingredients that could never before have been served.  So you had fresh grapes and fresh berries and fresh green vegetables in the middle of the winter in northern cities, and that really was important.  When we exhausted the supply of sea bass off the Grand Banks, we got it flown in live from Chile.  So the shipment and moving people around were very important.
	The change in the employment structure, in 1979 essentially most families, 60 percent of families with children, there was only one person working; that was the man.  Today it’s 75 percent, both husband and wife are working.  So there’s nobody around to shop, cook, and clean from Monday to Friday in large swathes of America.  The greatest growth in jobs in this county has been in service industry jobs, where those are places where you work long hours, not unionized, and the one thing your employer does for you is says, “Look, if you go out on a business lunch, you charge it to us, and if you work after 8:30,” which is what we do here, “anybody who works after 8:30 gets a free meal.”  So there’s a support of eating out by your business.  Lawyers, accountants, ad agency people, it’s not only their employer paying; the employer just passes on the bill to the client.  So as a lawyer, you know, my firm just put it on the bill.  Somebody else paid it.
	So there was very strong support for more eating out as opposed to eating at home, and the restaurant industry became more and more efficient during this period.  The Immigration Act of 1965 brought in Asian food, which was less expensive, Asian restaurants.  The best we can tell during these thirty years, restaurant prices, inflation, has been about 2 percent, not at the high end, but 2 percent overall.  The overall inflation for the country, which you can check, in the last thirty years is something more like 5 percent.  So the restaurant industry has become more and more efficient relative to everything else, and there are a huge number of restaurants.  Did you grow up in New York?

Q:  No, but I lived here in the sixties, so I can compare it to then.  I was in Washington for a long time, but I certainly know what it was like then.

Zagat:  You had maybe one restaurant on a block on Third Avenue.  Now you probably have six restaurants on a block.  The restaurants are mostly what we call BATH restaurants, Better Alternative to Home.  They are competing with what you can do yourself, and they are very good at it.  You’re better off spending an extra hour doing what you do well, which is writing or being a lawyer and getting paid for that, and making your mark in your profession, and let some little restaurant in the neighborhood do what it does well, and they buy wholesale, you buy retail.  When you throw in the value of your time, you’re probably better off eating out, and that has been driving more and more people into a new way of living.  Even the apartments on most of New York, the new buildings, have increasingly had small kitchens, and they really were not built, particularly in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, were not built for, unless you were a very fancy building, for serious cooking.  They were built for warming things up and doing things simply.
	Anyway, another factor that had played a major role was television and turning chefs into celebrities.  Julia Child probably started it, but we’ve now a full-time, twenty-four-hour network on cooking, and almost every local station has cooks’ shows, and it became a celebrity thing, and more and more people wanted to go to cooking school.  When I got out of college, I would say there were maybe ten cooking schools in the country.  There are over a hundred now.  Every state teachers college wants to put in a multi-million-dollar cooking program.  Then middle-class people more and more wanted to go into them, and there are thousands of young Americans who are well educated, going into this field.  When I was a kid, it was who the hell would go into cooking?  It was a hot, dirty job.  It’s for foreigners.  Now people are proud to say my son or my daughter is working for Daniel Boulud or for Eric Ripert.
So a whole mindset changed during this time, even something as simple as the School Lunch Act, which was initiated in the 1950s but it was actually implemented gradually over a fairly long time.  When I got out of school, and even Riverdale, they had a cafeteria but it was only put in in the sixth grade, between the time I started school and the sixth grade, I took a lunchbox.  Basically, most American kids were getting food prepared at home by their mother until, at the earliest, late 1950s, and most of the schools only put in cafeterias in the sixties and seventies.  But once they did, we were educating all of our children to eat out.  We were habituating them into the idea that you eat out every day.  So there’s just all of these factors.
I think back in terms of food, when I was a kid, Italian food usually came out of a can and was macaroni and spaghetti and had red sauce on it.  Chinese food was chow mein and chop suey, also out of a can.  Raw fish was a fraternity prank.  I mean, really, who would eat raw fish?  I mean, the only people who ate raw fish were kids who were having to get into a fraternity.  Then lettuce, iceberg; mushrooms, Parisian button cap.  My mother specifically told me that I should never eat anything that anybody said was a mushroom other than that, because it was probably poisonous and might kill me.  So I knew enough to stay away from anything else, and I think every other kid in America, practically, unless they really lived on a farm and had somebody who knew what they were eating, we didn’t have those things.
Every time I go into a restaurant, which is all the time, I’m sitting there and they say things to me, telling me about the menu, and I realize that 90 percent of what they’re saying I wouldn’t have had a clue what they were talking about when I was twenty years old.

Q:  Give me an example.

Zagat:  Oh, I mean pretty much any menu that I go to, they’re always talking about—I mean, I don’t have one in front of me, but I was just sitting at lunch today and it had sea urchin.  I didn’t know sea urchins were a food.  There was various kinds of sauces in it, that I have never, never heard of in those days, that are basically delicious.  I just every day hear people say things that were largely unknown fifty years ago, and it’s part of the excitement and growth of the culinary—we’ve been watching and happen to be lucky enough to be part of this amazing revolution, and the role, if we have a role that I can say we’re proud of is, that we gave people a voice, and we empowered the customer.  We have about 350,000 or 400,000 people now who do participate every year, and we do give them the chance to articulate, and at the same time we try to look at what they do and synopsize it so it’s useful to other people.

Q:  Let’s just go back for a second to the timing of this.  You started those informal guides in ’83?

Zagat:  No, this was ’79.  It’s called 1980, but it’s like the car year.  The 1980 model comes out in the fall of ’79.

Q:  You had the four guides in 1987.  So what happened in between those two years?

Zagat:  First we had three years of doing our hobby in New York.  Then we had three more years of doing a New York guide as a little book, and we went from 7,500 copies in ’83, 17,000 copies in ’84, I think it was, then 40,000 copies in ’85—these were sold—and then we had this cover story of New York Magazine that came out in December or November of ’85, and took us from 40,000 copies a year to 75,000 copies a month, in one month, which created havoc for us.

Q:  You mean the magazine article did?

Zagat:  Yes.  It was a big article, and suddenly everybody in New York said, “Hey, my friends are doing this.  This is cool.”

Q:  With what kind of staff?

Zagat:  Probably three, two or three of us, mostly me editing, and we had people printing it for us.  Anyway, the first year we wanted to get somebody to publish this for us, and we were turned down by everybody in the fall of ’82, I guess.  Instead of feeling bad about it, you know, we wanted to get a publisher, but it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to us.

Q:  You mean in the sense that you decided to publish it yourself?

Zagat:  Yes, well, first of all, we were willing to because it was our hobby.  The fact that other people didn’t appreciate what we were doing, we were sorry about it, but we liked doing what we were doing and we liked doing it the way we were doing it.  So we just kept on doing it.  I got turned down by two publishing houses that reported to me.  I was at Gulf & Western, and Simon & Schuster and Prentice Hall both turned me down, and that just tells you something, I guess.  My uncle owned Athenaeum.  They published the New York Times Guide, and he told me the reason he was turning us down was that they didn’t like local books, and, number one, none of the national publishers liked that, and, number two, he said the New York Times only sold 35,000, and we were already doing comparable at that point.  But he said, “It’s just not a big enough deal.”
So a few years later, after we were selling 75,000 a month, everybody came back, all the publishers came and said, “Can we help you?”  And we said, “No thanks.”  We were lucky, because they would have taken 80 percent or 90 percent of the revenue, and we would have gotten 10 to 20 percent, if we were lucky, and it wouldn’t have supported really going at it and creating a new publishing house.
In 1987 we came out with four books more, and the reason for that, among other things, was Nina, again, had a tax issue.  In 1986 we were making too much money.  That one month we were making half a million dollars a month, and Nina said, “We can’t do this.  We’ve got to spend money.”  So we decided to go into other places and reduce our taxable income.  We didn’t know what would happen, because we didn’t know whether people in Chicago would have a completely different take on food than people in New York, and that they would be overcome by putting a “le” in front of a name or a “la.”  It turned out that pretty much the same people were participating in all four other cities, and in the first year we were probably the number one selling guide in all four other cities.

Q:  That’s amazing.

Zagat:  Yes, it was, and none of this was particularly planned.  We did create a better mousetrap and we hit, I guess, a nerve, an interest of people’s.

Q:  How did you distribute the questionnaires that were in other cities?

Zagat:  We targeted the same kinds of people.  We sent it to law firms, accounting firms.  We tried to get somebody at each firm to circulate it.  We had friends who were lawyers pretty much everywhere, so we were able to get them to distribute.  I was at Gulf & Western, and I was in charge of a huge lot of litigation.  So there were lots of lawyers who were anxious to—I talked to them all the time, I’d tell them what we were doing.  “Send me a bunch.”
	So anyway, we were able to target people in each of those cities who were very much like the people that we were dealing with in New York, and we grew the amount of cash flow for the next fourteen or fifteen years.  I left full-time law practice in 1987, and Nina was in the middle of some major stuff and left in 1990.  We just figured it was better to have one person who had a full-time job in case this thing turned out to be a chimera.  Is it chimera [shimera] or kimera [with accents on first syllables]?

Q:  I think it’s chimera [accent on second syllable], but I’m not positive.

Zagat:  Chimera.  I didn’t get it right.  It’s like people pronounce my name.
So we kept on growing out of cash flow.  We did other things.  I’m a believer in the methodology, and Nina’s more food, and she’s more interested in international food.

Q:  What do you mean, you’re more of a believer in the methodology?

Zagat:  I love the idea of a democratic survey-based gathering of information, and it’s not that Nina doesn’t appreciate that, but I mean, if it was up to her, she would do probably all restaurants and more cities internationally.  We do cover ninety cities now for restaurants.  We cover a hundred and four countries for hotels, cover nightlife, which our sons got us to do, shopping, which we figured it was useful to have coverage.  We do movies, music, theater, a variety of other things.  I’m a believer in the methodology and she’s more interested in the substance.

Q:  How did these decisions for these new directions come about?

Zagat:  Usually we talk about them, and I’d say, “Let’s do hotels.”  We talk about every aspect, everything that’s important about what we do.  We talk to each other.  Gradually we had other people in the office who were actually knowledgeable about different things.  So we’d have a person who is head of trade sales, who’d advise us about what we should be doing for the bookstores and almost everything.  Originally I was very involved, and Nina was, because it was too small not to be.  So, for example, we both felt that having Lucite containers was a better way to represent the books in public and seeing them, so we decided that we’d make Lucites available to every store for free, and it worked.  It really holds the books up, and so we don’t have to worry about them being in the shelves and being invisible.
Obviously, behind me, we did deluxe books, which were gold- and silver-stamped, and the way that started was Peter Gogolak, who is a very famous football player and has scored more points for the New York Giants football franchise than any other player in its history, he and his brother Charlie came from Hungary with their family, escaped in 1956.  They both played professional football, and they revolutionized kicking in professional football because they kicked soccer style from the instep, and they kicked further and more accurately than any American.  Because the boys, when I was growing up, you kicked with the point of your toe and sometimes it went like that, and sometimes it went like that, and sometimes it went where you wanted it to.  Anyway, they proved that the European style of kicking was much more accurate and much more powerful.
	Peter, after he got through playing football, became chief financial salesman for Charles P. Young and then later R.R. Donnelley.  When he was at Charles P. Young, he came to me.  He’d seen our first book, and we were halfway through the first year, and he said could I make a deluxe edition and stamp their name on it.  I didn’t really know what a deluxe edition was.  So I asked him, “What is it you really want?”
	He said, “I want matte finish and heavier cover, and I want a gilding around the edges, and I want to stamp our company name on it.”  There’s a whole window full of them.

Q:  Yes, I was noticing that.

Zagat:  I said, “How many copies would you like?”
	He said, “Well, let’s start with 5,000,” and I almost fell off my chair.  Five thousand copies and we were sort of in the middle of the year and maybe had sold 3,500 up to that of all, and here’s somebody telling me before our next year he wants 5,000.

Q:  When was this?

Zagat:  That was in 1983, going into the ’84 year.  I thought that was fantastic.  In fact, I thought it was so exciting, I didn’t remember to talk to him about how much it would cost.  We had delivered it to him before—he called me and he said, “How much is this?”  And, jeez, 5,000 books and I haven’t talked to him, and I said how much I thought was reasonable, and he said that he thought that was more than reasonable, and the next week I got a check for that.
But what I didn’t realize that was more important than the sale of 5,000. Financial printers go around to every major company and they go to the vice president for marketing or they go to the chief financial officer or the president, and they try to get big printing.  Now, I started getting calls.  I mean, they were giving these out everywhere, all over the country, and I started getting calls from people like Citibank saying, “We got this thing from Charles P. Young.  Could you do 10,000 copies for us?”  It dawned on me that we had a forty-man sales force dealing with the most incredible companies in America, and they were paying us for the opportunity of doing this.  They’re still doing it all these years later, and it’s interesting—remind me [an aside to PR person who is observing the interview], I have to call R.R. Donnelley tomorrow.
	So we kept on going, and then in 1999 we set up our own website.  Before that, we had been very early in licensing electronic content, and our business was always basically electronic, and so we started licensing people like AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, in the 1980s.

Q:  So how did that work?  They would put your content on their—

Zagat:  Yes, on their sites, and they’d pay us for that.  Then the Baby Bells came in and they did it, and Time Warner did it, and something called Pathfinder.  We then did our own site in 1999, which I thought was unbelievably expensive, but Nina sort of took the lead on that, and she still does.  I call her my web mistress, because I really do not have the knowledge that she does about the internet.
Our site was quite popular, people liked it, and all sorts of people in the venture capital world started coming around and saying, how about spinning off the dot.com part of our business, and they wanted to run it up a tree and then sell it for as many million dollars as they could.

Q:  Meanwhile, the staff grew, right?  I mean, the staff grew from nothing to—

Zagat:  The staff at that point was probably thirty or forty by 1999.

Q:  In the beginning, what kind of people did you hire?  Did you hire editors?

Zagat:  We had editors gradually.  I’m not even sure exactly, without looking back and looking at employment records.  We gradually had more editors; we had more people in trade sales; we had more people in corporate sales.  Corporate sales were the kind of deluxe books, and they were very high-margin books, so we had more and more people doing that.  But it was all kind of gradual and by seeing which way the wind was blowing.  Both of us had at least the experience of being lawyers, so we were not neophytes and we knew how to read a balance sheet.

Q:  I’m trying to get a sense of what your lives were like.  For how long were you the ones that were more or less synthesizing the content?

Zagat:  Probably until sometime like 1990.  I probably was still doing it even in the early 1990s.  I was the principal editor, and PR was principally me, but Nina also was more and more, and she’s gotten better in many ways than I am.  Tiffany will tell you, she’s much more succinct and she’s both very bright, but also she really answers questions simply and clearly.

Q:  Was it hard for you to give up having the last word on what these little snippets of information were?

Zagat:  No.  I still was looking at them probably into the late 1990s.  I still had the editorial right to change something if I didn’t like it, but we had really good people.  We have an editorial department that is first-class, and the people have gotten so good that I am now, for the most part, I may read the front of a book.  I was looking at the front of a book for Seoul, Korea, when you came in.  But for the most part, I don’t read the text except if I’m interested particularly in, let’s say, the top fifty restaurants in New York.  I like to see what we said about them, but I know that I’m not going to have to make any changes.
The key, by the way, in terms of editing, is, one, if you have hundreds of people saying what they think, there are themes that come out, and these reviews almost write themselves.  The other thing is the numerical ratings are like the lines on the ball field on which you play.  If something is a twenty-five, you cannot say it’s anything other than excellent food.  You could say it’s expensive food or you could say it’s unusual because Chef Gray was working in Thailand for the last five years, was using Thai spices on French food, but you’ve got to say it’s great.  Six for décor, it could be an amusing dump, but it’s a dump.  It’s not a beautiful, fancy—you cannot use the word “beautiful” for a six.
So we have a lot of things which basically help these things write them in a disciplined and, hopefully, fair way.  The worst thing that could ever happen to us is if we started producing results that were untrue or unfair.  We go to great lengths to try to make sure, and I don’t think we’ve ever been faulted for the accuracy and fairness of what we’re saying.  If you have a thousand people or five hundred people who’ve been in a restaurant and they’re telling you what they’re experiencing, there aren’t too many ways you can make a mistake.  Also we have gone to great lengths to make sure that nobody can cheat.  We’ve spent millions of dollars doing that.

Q:  You mean say things about restaurants they haven’t been to?

Zagat:  Yes.  But more the restaurant, we drive more traffic in probably than anybody else, at least have for a long time, and we want to make sure that the restaurant doesn’t decide to get into the game and vote for itself.

Q:  Oh, of course.  What about eating and cooking?  Have those habits in your life changed, the two of you?

Zagat:  When we’re in New York, we probably eat out six nights out of seven, and we eat out lunch probably five days a week.  But in the country, we cook.  I grill and Nina cooks.  She still is a good cook.

Q:  The shape of the book, was it a model done the Michelin shape?

Zagat:  It’s not the Michelin shape.

Q:  It’s not?

Zagat:  No.  Michelin is wider and shorter, and we designed the shape so that it would go into pockets, and Michelin doesn’t.  The other thing is when the venture capitalists came along and they gave us about 32 million dollars, we then had agreed with them, the ones that we ultimately took, because we had lots of choices, we took General Atlantic Partners, Allen & Company, and Kleiner Perkins, which are probably three of the best venture capital people in the country, and we had three individuals.  Nathan Myhrvold, who is the founding technology officer of Microsoft and is a great friend, and he runs a company called Intellectual Ventures, which is a fantastically interesting company, and he’s working on what I think is going to be the seminal cookbook of our era right now, out in Seattle, talking about the equipment and new techniques of cooking.

Q:  I don’t understand what you’re describing, actually.

Zagat:  Nathan Myhrvold’s cookbook.

Q:  I mean, but how different?

Zagat:  Well, you know about people like Ferran Adrià, right?  Ferran Adrià is really a chemist.  Nathan is doing a lot of looking at what he and Fergus Henderson and a lot of other innovative chefs are doing around the world, but he’s also using equipment that has never been seen.

Q:  Got it.

Zagat:  Centrifuges, for example, being used in cooking.  The ability to make ice cream and freeze it in about five seconds for the pint of ice cream.  It starts liquid, pfffft, using blowtorches.  There are lots and lots of techniques that are not widely used yet, and he’s showing what these techniques are and what their advantages are.
They had in New York the sous vide—we had a wonderful health commissioner, Tom Frieden, who in most ways was terrific.  He’s now head of the Centers for Disease Control out of Atlanta.  But Tom didn’t really understand sous vide cooking.  Sous vide has never caused anybody to get sick, and it’s safer than normal cooking.  So he required all the restaurants in New York to do very complicated things, which caused 90 percent of them to get out of the sous vide cooking business.
Nathan is writing about what temperatures and how to use sous vide in a lot of stuff that has never been put down on paper before, and this book, which is not a book, it’s going to be three books, and it’s going to probably sell for $1,000, and it’s going to be like no—I mean, he’s putting money into it that nobody normal could do.  He’s a billionaire.  Anyway, so Nathan is one of our investors and is a wonderful person, who’s interested, as we are, in food.
Nick Negreponte, who is a dean of the media lab at MIT, and Nancy Peretsman, who is probably the leading woman investment banker in the media, they are the investors.  They wanted us to do several things: one, to create a management team that could survive us if anything happened to us, which we’ve done; number two—and we wanted the same things, obviously—to create a data management system that’s digital, so that we could slice and dice content in any way you could imagine or could dream up; and thirdly, to conduct surveys anywhere in the world in real time in any language.  So we have people voting in Japan right now in Japanese.  I can’t read what they say, but our system allows that.  We have them voting in France in French, anything we would like in that regard.
We had to make sure that the system was secure and that we were able to target the people that we wanted and eliminate the people that we didn’t want.  We spent years doing it and were very careful.  It wasn’t really until about 2005, maybe 2006, we fully switched to online surveying, and everything has become digital.

Q:  You mean so that the voters can do that online?

Zagat:  Yes.  Up to probably 2003 or 2002 we were entirely on paper, and online we were doing it on an experimental basis, and finally we made the complete switch.

Q:  What has all this meant to your own lives?

Zagat:  It’s completely changed them.  I think one of the things that changed our lives goes back to our time in Paris, where we saw and then got to understand the different kind of culture and society which has six weeks off.  Most Americans think, “Oh, my god, six weeks.  How can they get anything done?  How can they do that?”
The first summer I was in Paris, I had a deal going through that I thought was going to be closed in the middle of August, and I didn’t know that the French law firm I was working with was going to close for the whole month of August.  I told the clients in New York that the thing would be over by probably mid August.
I called on the first of August, and nobody was there.  “Oh, my god.  How can you do that?”
After a while, I got to understand that there’s a real value in stopping and appreciating your family, and their interest in food, which played, certainly then, a larger part in their lives than ours, there were other ways to look at life and that slowing down a little bit is a healthy thing.
	I think that in some ways we followed our vision of shared experience and doing something that was new and democratic, and also was, I think, more accurate than anybody else ever had done.  To this day, I think we’re more accurate.  But it’s fun when your hobby turns into your business.  It isn’t as if we stopped working.  I mean, we have to work very hard, in some ways harder than ever, although lawyers worked hard.  Now when I go out at night and I go touring restaurants, that’s part of my work, but it doesn’t feel like work to me.

Q:  Actually, how do you do that?  Do you go to one restaurant per night?

Zagat:  No, I go to twenty or twenty-five.

Q:  Are you serious?

Zagat:  I’m serious.

Q:  How do you do that?

Zagat:  Get in the car, get a driver, and go up and down.  I may take all the restaurants in one part of town, or I may go to all the new restaurants, or I may go to all the oldest restaurants.  I may go out to—

Q:  So you mean you kind of just check in?

Zagat:  I’m checking restaurants and seeing how busy they are.  You can basically know everything there is to know about a restaurant, except how the food tastes, in five minutes.  You can look at the menu.  You can see whether it’s pretentious or straightforward, and how much things are.  You can smell.  Some places smell good and some don’t.  Stale food is a very bad sign for a restaurant.  You can see whether people are—how they’re dressed and whether they’re animated and whether the place is full, and whether people are doing like that.  And you can look at the way the food is presented.  You can just look at it, and I go into the kitchen a lot just to see.  But really, I said in an article, I think in the New York Times maybe twenty years ago, that I thought like 80, 85 percent accurate reviews in five minutes, and it was a little over the top to say that, I guess, but sometimes I’m over the top.

Q:  How does it work?  Where do you eat?

Zagat:  Oh, at the end of the evening we usually stop at the place we thought looked best, and we come back and we eat.  Most nights I just go to one restaurant, like you do, and I know where I want to go, and I go and I eat, and that’s it.  But I go out a lot just as a kind of overview, and I’ve done that for years and years.

Q:  With a driver?

Zagat:  Yes.  I do it for charity sometimes.  I mean, quite a few times, I take somebody.  The last time I did it, somebody paid $20,000 to just come along with me and have part of the experience.

Q:  And not eat a morsel.  [laughs]

Zagat:  No, at the end we eat.  By the time you’ve been through twenty restaurants, you are very, very hungry.  So we then sit down and we have a good meal.
One of the things which we did, Contact Management System made it possible to customize guides any way you can think of, and we can do it electronically as well.  So we do micro sites for clients, and for office buildings we will put the office building or apartment house in the middle, and then we will have, let’s say, five blocks in all directions.  So we show what the building looks like, and we populate the neighborhood with all the shops and the restaurants and nightlife and tourist attractions.

Q:  Who do you do that for?  For real estate companies or—

Zagat:  We do it for real estate companies; we do it for banks; we do it for universities.  The largest single sale we ever made was for Bank of America, and we did five million copies of a movie guide in one shot, which, except for Harry Potter, was the largest book sale of that year, and we didn’t have all the complexities of selling it to a lot of bookstores and getting returns.  We had a one-shot, everybody goes to them, and that’s it. 
	We did have one funny or not-so-funny thing happen.  Thank God, they didn’t tell me.  Our production head, who’s wonderful, found out that one of the three printing plants that this book was in—it took three plants to do it—they had taken the books and put them on a hot, humid cement floor.  One of the keys to this book was that it was being done on very light paper and light cover, so that you could put it in the mail with the minimal postage, and it had accumulated enough humidity so it went over the postage.  We would have had another thirty-two cents on two million books; it was a $600,000 mistake.  So she went down, and thank God she didn’t tell me about it because I’d have had a heart attack.  The printing plants have these gigantic knives, and she cut off a little bit around the edges.  They didn’t know and I didn’t know for months later that she had done that.

Q:  You obviously have a very big part of your staff that is skilled with the new world, whether it’s digital or doing things like that. 

Zagat:  Yes.

Q:  At what point did that become a necessary part of your business?

Zagat:  Well, it started in probably 1999, maybe earlier, because we were licensing—Nina is closer to it, so she’d be better able to—

Q:  I’ll ask her, yes.

Zagat:  You’re doing an interview with her too?

Q:  Yes.

Zagat:  Good.  See if she says the same things as I do.  Maybe she’ll say totally different—she’s very much more self-controlled.  Isn’t she?  Yes.
So anyway, we like what we do.  It’s a fun thing.  It’s not the idea that you just go out and eat and have a good time.  There are a lot of aspects of this that are work.  When you have 100-and-something people full-time and 180 part-time, you’re worrying about people saying, “I want to go on vacation now,” and somebody has problems with their family, and somebody else is this and that, and you have all the kind of things that you have to manage in any business with people.  But I think the people that work with us tend to like it, and the one thing that we really look for is people who are nice.  I think the culture here is, if you’re not nice, you’re not going to be here.  There are certain values.  Like, if you don’t have something to do, see if you can help somebody else, things like—this goes back to my Riverdale days—but the other fellow first, try to think about how other people feel.  I think most of the people here very much meet those standards, and, as I say, if they really don’t, they’re not going to be here.

Q:  It has that congenial reputation.  What about layoffs?  I mean, everybody is doing it all over the place.  Has your income changed?

Zagat:  The last quarter of the year represents probably 40 percent of our business usually, and last year, the beginning of October was like driving off a cliff.  All the big banks who were regular customers of ours and had been for years, were nowhere, so I would say we lost 15 percent of our business, which was probably at that period of time probably 30 percent of the last quarter.  Everybody else was going through the same thing.  We let go probably twenty or so people.
The thing is, we never let anybody go in the history of the business, and in some ways that maybe speaks to the kind of people we are and the way we feel about people who work with us.  But it also, last year, forced us to look at who is really contributing most and who’s not.  I think for a lot of businesses—I’ve talked to other people about it—to some degree it was a useful exercise.  On the other hand, it would have been nice if it hadn’t been such complete crisis.
I have a friend who runs one of the biggest stock exchange companies, and he said just literally last year—it was one of the brand-name big companies—he said he’d had no idea how to run his business because the prices of the things that he was doing were changing so dramatically on a daily basis, he couldn’t make any plans.  Until things were stabilized, which I think was very important and very healthy for the country, people really didn’t know where things were going.  So you had to act as if things were not going to be great.  This year has turned out to be fine.

Q:  That’s wonderful.  Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you would like to talk about?  Actually I had planned to ask you about some of the changes that you’ve seen over the years, but you talked about that, and if there’s any more about that, that, of course is always welcome.

Zagat:  I would say that it might be worthwhile for you to look either here or look in the—we have a storage room that has a lot of samples, and how they’re done.  I think they’re very unusual, and they’re used as marketing tools for all kinds of companies.  We do private-label surveying, which is something most people don’t know we do.  We’re surveying, I think, about fifty million people for Wellpoint.

Q:  What is that?

Zagat:  Wellpoint is the old Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance.  What we’re doing is asking people not what they think of their doctors, because, you know, I don’t know if my doctor is a good cardiologist or not, but I do know whether my doctor is accessible, and when I call, does the doctor return my call.  I do know whether the doctor has a nice office.

Q:  Wow.  That’s revolutionary.

Zagat:  Yes, well, nobody’s ever done it before, and we’re doing it for fifty million people.  It’s all being done through the Wellpoint system, and we’re just going to be starting—have they started in New York yet?

[Unidentified speaker]:  We did.  Last month we launched.

Zagat:  It’s launched in New York?  Okay.  But we’re asking questions, do you think your doctor has good communication skills?  Is he clear?  Is he empathetic?  You know, whatever.  Does he make you feel good?  Those are things that the patient can answer.  We are surveying extensively, and we’re making that information available to the doctors in the Wellpoint system.  Wellpoint would go to the wall to defend the credibility to the doctor’s competence.  They choose the doctors because they’re competent, in their opinion.  But they think the doctor ought to know.  You can be the greatest doctor in the world, but if you’re in New York with a stomachache and he’s in Italy making a speech and he doesn’t have somebody covering, there’s a problem.  It’s those kinds of things.  If patients feel the doctor doesn’t call them back or doesn’t call them back reasonably quickly, that’s a real issue.  The doctor should know the patient feels that way, and other patients should know it so they pick a different doctor.
	We are surveying a lot of places for something called Drinkwell, which is Diageo, largest distributor of liquor in the United States, and it’s a program where we survey the well.  In a restaurant the bar is called the well.  We’re surveying people about the quality of both their service, their knowledge about drinks, and the quality of the drinks that they serve.  The people at Diageo will make available training sessions and things like that, so if they’re not doing very well in terms of the scores, it gives them an incentive to go to school and improve.

Q:  In your own business, what about things like Facebook and Twitter and all that?  Do you have a lot of people doing that?

Zagat:  Yes, we have a fair number, but I’m, again, the last person in this business you should ask that question to.  Everybody is talking Twitter, but I have not come to terms with Twitter.  We have people in Israel, several people, who are doing nothing but twittering for us, or tweeting or whatever.  Nina knows a lot more about that, and we have people on staff who are really, I would say, experts.  I think they have to train me a little bit on that, because Nina is on Facebook, and I think we have a Facebook account, but—

Q:  I’m sure you do.

Zagat:  I know we do, but I’m the last person in the office who will learn about this.

Q:  No, actually I meant you would have to hire people to know how to do this.

Zagat:  We have a bunch of people.  We have probably, oh, I don’t know, ten, fifteen at least, who are doing nothing but this, and it could be more, probably should be.  We also are in something that is important strategically; we are of the view that in order to produce quality content, you have to get paid for it.  It is insane to give away what you are selling in another platform.  We, like the Wall Street Journal, you have to be a member of our—you can get a lot of free content, and probably 80 percent of the people who come to our site are getting free content, but we are fundamentally making money consistently out of the premium memberships.  It’s going to be a very interesting issue, because I think all the newspapers are beginning to realize that they made a huge mistake and devalued the quality of their content, and, at the same time, because they devalued it, they then had to let go a lot of their writers.  I think it’s just bad for the whole field of journalism that so much of this stuff has been made available for free, and I believe that the major newspapers are now turning around and saying, “How do we get—?”

Q:  They’re going to have to.

Zagat:  Yes, but they have damaged themselves and I think they’ve damaged a lot of their employees in the process.

Q:  How do you handle the weight issues?

Zagat:  W-e-i-g-h-t?

Q:  Yes.

Zagat:  I, obviously, don’t handle them as well as I might.  I did lose thirty pounds over the last four or five months, and I could well afford to lose another thirty pounds over the next few months.

Q:  It must be impossible.

Zagat:  Well, it’s another thing, my mother could eat anything, and she was always thin.  My father looked like me.  It’s an issue.  But I also like to eat.

Q:  Is it a health issue?

Zagat:  Oh, yes.  I don’t think being overweight is healthy.  I think everybody knows.  I have a trainer who comes every morning, and I go out if the weather is good in Central Park.  Otherwise, I run around the apartment.  And I try to be careful.  I had today a salad at a wonderful restaurant around the corner, and I had a half portion of spaghetti with sea urchin.
	Have I missed something?  Let me just see.  Have a missed anything important?  Seeing all the customized books is interesting, seeing things like that, and there’s just endless things we’re getting in.  We have a wine club that is turning out to be fantastic.

Q:  That’s interesting.  You see the Wall Street Journal wine club and this wine club and that wine club, and you wonder how they’re all doing.

Zagat:  I don’t know how they’re doing.  I know how we’re doing.  We set a goal of—am I allowed to say?  Oh, I won’t.

Q:  You’ve set a goal.  Okay.

Zagat:  We’ve set a goal, and we are way ahead of where our goal—

Q:  Congratulations.

Zagat:  —in a very short period of time.  And people have said—I guess they assume that Zagat, being food, must have something they want.  And, in fact, we’ve done some things that nobody else is doing.  We’re letting everybody in the wine club rate the wines they get.  It’s all transparent, so you can see how everybody else rates the wine.  If you don’t like a wine, you just take it off your bill.  So you don’t have to send it back.  If you don’t want next week’s case or next month’s case, there’s a simple way of just saying, “Don’t send anything to me for about six months.”  But the keen difference is that everybody is able to rate it so you could see whether your point of view is shared by a lot of other people, and if you want to get more, then you can based on how everybody rated it, not just yourself.  I think it’s reassuring to know that several thousand people felt that it was good before you go and buy a case of wine.
	It’s also very cheap.  The wines are selected by people who go around the world looking for very small vineyards that are too small to make it into the trade, and then they buy up the whole vineyard and obviously get very good prices.  We pick the wines that go into our people’s case, and then our people are tasting and voting, and have the right to, if they don’t like it, just chalk it off their account.

Q:  What’s interesting to me about your business is that it not only has reflected exactly what’s happened in the relationship between people and food and wine in this country, but also communication, in terms of how information is communicated.

Zagat:  I think that, to some degree, we’re different, in that we are applying some levels of discipline to the information.  So we’re not just saying go here, talk whatever, say whatever you think about this restaurant.  We’re saying, first give us a rating on a scale of thirty on the food, on the décor, on the service.  Tell us how much you think it costs, and now talk about those key elements, focus on what we think are key elements in the experience.  We target people who are particularly avid about things, so the movie guide we have something like 18,000 to 20,000 people who see over a hundred movies a year and vote on over a hundred movies.

Q:  This is just online or it’s actually a book as well?

Zagat:  It’s a book but all the voting is online.  The golf guide we have, I don’t know, seven thousand or eight thousand golfers, but they play on average of twenty-eight courses a year.  They’re playing in two different courses every month, which is very unusual.  I mean they really are golf course collectors, and so we’re targeting people and we’re putting them into some degree of—on the movies you have to rate the acting, the storyline, the production values and would you recommend this movie to your friends.  We know who these people are, so we know if it’s twenty-year-old men or fifty-year-old women.  We know who is saying what they’re saying, and that can be extremely different, depending on the movie.
	Everything we do is in some ways more organized, and we edit and at the end of the day we have all the open comments, you can see them, but then we edit them into a brief, usable review, which most of the websites are just, I mean, getting on the corner and screaming at each other.  You know it is not the same thing as having experts edit.  We have probably the leading editors of restaurant critics in every major city in the country who work for us.

Q:  What do you mean?

Zagat:  We have leading restaurant critics all over the country who work for us.

Q:  In the sense that they give you reviews?

Zagat:  First they give us a list of the local restaurants that they think are important enough to be surveyed.  Two, then when the results are in, we will edit it, but then they’ll read it and say, “You didn’t get that right.”  Or, “It’s a little too enthusiastic.”  They will also be there as a backstop for accuracy, so that it’s one of the many ways we protect against the system being misused.  They will say, “That can’t be.  You’d better look at that.  You’d better check the voting again of the surveying team.  You’d better check and see what the survey [unclear].”

Q:  You say you pay them, but presumably the people who comment on movies or restaurants or anything don’t get paid.

Zagat:  No, we have 350,000 to 400,000 people not getting paid, but sending us information.  We have about 180 people whose job it is—usually two in every city—one is to get out the vote, make sure that local people know about this is going on and vote.  The other is usually a restaurant critic or somebody very knowledgeable about local food, who will—let’s say twenty people say, “Beautiful, lovely, gorgeous restaurant.”  Okay?  But nobody says wood panel Victorian or peach postmodern.  It makes all the difference in the world.  So that the critic, the professional critic, is not allowed to change the opinion and is not allowed to touch the numbers, but can add key facts that help draw the picture of what it is we’re looking at.

Q:  I know the person in Washington, so now I understand what you’re referring to.

Zagat:  For example, let’s say you get that restaurant unusual French food, she would say, “Yes, it’s unusual because the chef is doing Thai spices.”  We say, “Good, that adds facts,” but not opinion.

Q:  I see, and that’s very helpful.

Zagat:  When we first started this and we first started hiring editors, we really had to work with them to get them to not say how they felt.

Q:  That’s interesting.  Thank you very much.  This has been absolutely fascinating.

[End of interview]