“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

https://www.jmspae.se/write-ups/kebabs-train-stations/

by TeMPOraL • 1 year ago

586 353 1 year ago

Anecdotally, it's the same for coffee. Office lobby coffee shops are invariably terrible. The decent ones are always at least a 5-10 minute walk away.

thwarted• 1 year ago

Sometimes in another office building's lobby.

madcaptenor• 1 year ago

The coffee from the machine in the office is even worse.

bayindirh3• 1 year ago

Visit us. You'll be surprised. :D

nkrisc• 1 year ago

The last office I worked in not only had terrible coffee, but the machine had a touch screen and required network connectivity and regularly crashed, prohibiting all dispensation of coffee. It also reportedly came with a 5 figure monthly operating cost.

The coffee in the lobby was only slightly better, but at least the baristas didn’t crash during their OTA updates.

A 10 minute walk away and you’d find the best coffee for at least a couple miles around.

macrael6• 1 year ago

OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality

energy123• 1 year ago

OP failed to reject the null hypothesis of no correlation at the given power level.

calmbonsai2• 1 year ago

This makes intuitive sense.

High mass-transit corridor real-estate (rail, air, road) leases come at a premium so those higher fixed-costs and must be balanced against a higher-volume of less-breadth of service with the same fixed (or even slightly higher) labor costs.

In food service, high-volume is (mostly) inversely correlated with quality.

macrael6• 1 year ago

OP found no correlation

dietr1ch3• 1 year ago

Reviews probably have too much noise. It's not only the food that gets rated and people taking the time to rate a place might be doing so because of a particularly good or bad experience they just had. It's not really a day to day thing.

calmbonsai2• 1 year ago

Then OP shouldn't have used that title. My reasoning still stands.

jdiez17• 1 year ago

Looking at their actual results (https://preview.redd.it/znmnejgab5je1.png?width=1000&format=...), I don't see any positive or negative correlation. Although I can subjectively confirm the hypothesis.

bitwize• 1 year ago

I've observed the following:

1) An alarming number of regions in the world have a pizza joint called "New York Pizza", "Manhattan Pizza", or similar.

2) The similarity of the pizza therein to the actual thin, greasy slices served up in pizza joints from actual New York is inversely proportional to the location's distance from New York.

So, the New York Pizza in Boston -- pretty close. The New York Pizza in Brisbane, QLD is alien by comparison and I think they consider "pepperoni" and "salami" interchangeable down there.

pinkmuffinere• 1 year ago

While the work provides some additional data, it does little more than re-propose an already-common hypothesis — that pizza which is closer in distance is also closer in flavor. The author is searching for the minimum publishable unit, and misses even that mark. I advise against publishing.

awesome_dude• 1 year ago

I think they consider "pepperoni" and "salami"

Mate, spicy snags are spicy snags

Edit: Used the actual aussie word for sausages...

crazygringo3• 1 year ago

To be fair, pepperoni is literally just spicy salami. Salami with hot peppers added. Hence the "pepper" in the name.

triceratops• 1 year ago

Hence the "pepper" in the name.

Pepperomi doesn't quite have the same ring to it

immibis• 1 year ago

I've heard that the farther you go from Italy, the more adventurous ingredients you can find on a pizza.

I used to live in New Zealand.

arccy2• 1 year ago

we must invade italy and show them the true enlightenment that is pineapple on pizza

protocolture2• 1 year ago

The New York Pizza in Brisbane, QLD is alien by comparison and I think they consider "pepperoni" and "salami" interchangeable down there.

It gets even worse south of brisbane in Logan.

We have like, one wholesale supplier of "Halal Beef Pepperoni" and all the non chain pizza shops down here seem to have standardised on it, to appeal to the local religious sensibilities.

Its like eating a damp meat flavoured rag. It has no spice to it.

We have a "Brooklyn Slice" opening up, and they seem to be advertising normal salami. If its spicy at all, it will change the game.

janwillemb• 1 year ago

He didn't find a correlation, or rather found that there is no correlation, between proximity to a railway station and how the kebab is reviewed. It's a nice study for a statistics class!

SamBam• 1 year ago

As far as I can tell, his study is looking for a correlation with the distance to Metro stations.

This is a big difference. There are hundreds of Metro stations in Paris. Everywhere is close to one.

I think the original intent was distance to a train station. If Paris is anything like Rome, close to the railway station is cheap hostels and recent immigrants accommodations.

emaro• 1 year ago

At the end of article it's shown that only considering train stations didn't really change the result.

HanayamaTriplet• 1 year ago

The original data includes "train and metro stations", but figure 9 filtered the data to only include train stations and arrived at the same conclusion.

nicolas_t• 1 year ago

That saying in France is usually understood to be for cities outside of Paris and only referring to "Gares" (that word is used for train stations, not for subway stations). Anecdotally, I'd say it holds true in general in most cities I've visited (with Paris being an exception)

myhf• 1 year ago

There may not be a correlation, but you can clearly see that the bottom-right quadrant of the plot is basically empty, which is an important insight.

A more accurate aphorism would be "You can sell good kebabs anywhere, but you can only sell bad kebabs near a train station."

And if you look at the "minimum viable quality" instead of the overall quality, there does seem to be a linear correlation with the distance. You can use a 5% quantile regressor to easily find the lower edge of the distribution.

robocat4• 1 year ago

"You can sell good kebabs anywhere, but you can only sell bad kebabs near a train station."

Insightful!

97.38% of bad studies measure the wrong variable.

Do drunk french people buy kebabs? In my city one central late night kebab place has great kebabs. Anecdotally I remember one great kebab cart serving at least one drunken customer in Nice (France) - not near a station and a long way from the Paris metro!

I think there's some population selection flaws. Drunk people don't leave reviews. In foreign countries it is difficult to know the correct search term.

I suggest an alternative study: how much lager does it need to make a train station kebab taste great?

tialaramex3• 1 year ago

but you can clearly see that the bottom-right quadrant of the plot is basically empty, which is an important insight.

I don't think so? It's mostly a result of the fact that (obviously) the best place to sell food is where there are people, which is also the best place to put a metro station. So on average the kebabs are pretty good and on average they're near a station. In Figure 9 one of the worst reviewed restaurants is over 3km from a metro.

You're likely seeing a pattern where there isn't one, which is normal for humans.

There's one obvious place to go around here for a good kebab, it's a few minutes walk to the station, but the way you can tell it's the best place for a kebab is how late it's open every night. Long after other kebab places are dark they're still doing enough business to justify remaining open.

The best place for pizza in my city is very close to a train station but that's a total accident, they park (it's a van, no really, best pizza in the city but they hated owning a restaurant so they put their oven in a van instead) in the car park of a railway station's pub about five minutes walk from me.

FabHK• 1 year ago

Wonder whether that's an instance of Berkson's paradox.

Basically nobody bothering to report about Kebab shops that are neither good nor conveniently located. Probably not, but "one quadrant empty" is a handy red flag that you might encounter Berkson's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

wjholden2• 1 year ago

Pedantic nitpick: he didn't find a linear correlation.

Let x=[-5..+5] and y=[25,16,9,4,1,0,1,4,9,16,25] (that is, x²). The Pearson correlation coefficient, R², will be zero. We know that y is dependent on x, but isn't linearly dependent.

myheartisinohio• 1 year ago

The only place this isn't true is Japan.

bayindirh3• 1 year ago

Thinking about Turkey, that might not hold true either. Some of the best shops are both small and very close to mass transit in where I live.

Etheryte• 1 year ago

I mean, it's not true in general if you actually read the article.

Whilst there are some minor indications that the hypothesis could be correct (eg. many of the absolute worst restaurants being some of the closest) the correlation is simply too weak.

oceliker• 1 year ago

it's not true in general if you actually read the article.

Only if you agree with the article's methodology :)

drchickensalad• 1 year ago

Honestly NYC has a lot of its best restaurants by train stations, throughout every borough.

thebruce87m• 1 year ago

Always like reading the Best Kebab reviews on trip advisor. It’s right next to Queen Street railway station so fits with the study.

https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g186534-d125...

Not only was my food uncooked but I also discovered a pubic hair in my chips and cheese, then when I proceeded to report the problem, I was chased with a knife. Down Dundas Street.Absolutely scandalous

Boogie_Man• 1 year ago

For context: "Knifey Chaseies" is an historic pastime in Glasgow where this shop is located. An immigrant flare to a local tradition!

Glawen• 1 year ago

Haa so many memories passing this kebab at the end of the night. I confirm it is the worst I ever tasted, but chips were Ok

macrael6• 1 year ago

LOL we may need to update the title of this post, half the top level comments right now are assuming the study confirmed the hypothesis.

With a mighty Pearson's correlation of 0.091, the data indicates that this could
be true! If you ignore the fact that the correlation is so weak that calling it 'statistically
insignificant' would be quite generous.

lostdog• 1 year ago

The more generally interesting a topic is the more likely a HN user is to read the article. A study.

tialaramex3• 1 year ago

I am definitely guilty of sometimes clicking "reply" and then reading the linked article to check that I'm not about to essentially tell you what you'd have read or worse, tell you something the article actually debunks.

AlienRobot• 1 year ago

I only read articles with headlines that describe informative content, not with headlines that sound funny or thought-provoking.

daotoad• 1 year ago

Would it help if I were to chime in with a response about the benefits of kebab case over train case?

btown• 1 year ago

Hi there, inventor of the kebab plugin for traindeck here. I'm afraid I was the one who introduced the concept of kebab case, way back in the early 1990s. Back then, trains didn't have enough processing power to handle full cuts of meat, so I thought I'd introduce kebabs as a hack, and it ended up taking off! Didn't expect anyone to still be using it. It's always fun to share stories on HN - you never know who you'll meat here.

aqueueaqueue4• 1 year ago

Easy fix: just add a ? to the end.

Buldak• 1 year ago

"study" is already in scare quotes

gwerbret• 1 year ago

Heh. You've just captured the reason why (the better) clinical journals explicitly and specifically forbid having a statement of results in the title of a paper.

cloudbonsai• 1 year ago

be true! If you ignore the fact that the correlation is so weak that calling it 'statistically insignificant' would be quite generous.

I actually came to a different conclusion than the author. Here is the way I'm thinking about the presented statistics:

1. There is 17 Kebab shops (out of 400 samples) with a google review lower than 3 stars. Let's call them "bad kebabs".

2. All those "bad kebabs" actually located within 500m from the nearest station. No kebab located in further than >500m is bad.

3. So if you've ever gotten a bad donor kebab, we can safely assume that you have purchased it from a kebab shop near a train station.

Maybe there are so many kebab eaters near a train station that a mediocre kebab offering becomes profitable?

magicalhippo• 1 year ago

with a google review lower than 3 stars

At least here, the majority of 1-2 star reviews are actually complaining about third-party delivery services like Foodora[1].

Of course the fries will be soggy and the burger luke warm when you got a guy who had to pedal a bike for half an hour to deliver it for you. Like what did you expect?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodora

ant6n• 1 year ago

Bad kebab shops may survive if located near a train station.

Galanwe• 1 year ago

2. All those "bad kebabs" actually located within 500m from the nearest station. No kebab located in further than >500m is bad.

Right, but this is selection bias. There will always exist a distance D from which all bad kebabs are located.

Unless D is provenly chosen _before_ looking at the data, this has no meaning.

One also has to take the kebab density into account.

gnabgib• 1 year ago

Ongoing discussion (due to the SCP) (58 points, 7 hours/4 days ago, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43123810

woodruffw2• 1 year ago

Running the analysis while adjusting for station size/passenger volume would be interesting: Paris's transit network is very dense and remarkably uniform, so you'd expect a somewhat uniform distribution of quality around train station entrances/exits as a whole. Meanwhile, anecdotally, some of the worst döner I've had in my life was in large/intercity train terminals.

bombcar• 1 year ago

My expectation would be it's the passenger type - if 80% of the people pass through the station never to return, you're going to get quite a different setup than if 80% are daily commuters.

woodruffw2• 1 year ago

Yeah, good phrasing -- I was treating volume as a proxy for visiting passengers vs. regulars, but that's not correct in all cases.

Or intuitively: who doesn't lower their standards when they buy a meal at an airport or major train terminal? We all do!

lupusreal2• 1 year ago

Kebabs are like cheese steaks; the best one is whichever is closest to wherever I am.

gambiting2• 1 year ago

What's a cheese steak? Just a steak but with melted cheese on top? Doesn't that ruin the steak?

bdangubic2• 1 year ago

it would if it was actually a steak. for the type of meat you get on cheeesteaks - trust me - you want the cheese :)

awad• 1 year ago

The steak is sliced very thin and cooked (often with cheese incorporated), so think of it as more of a beef sandwich than a steak on bread.

zoklet-enjoyer• 1 year ago

I got sick off of train station sushi in Sydney. Never again

billfor• 1 year ago

Well you would be fine in Japan.

mxfh3• 1 year ago

Duh, commuters are just less picky with their food choices, reliably fast service trumps food quality here for obvious reasons. Tourists as mentioned in the article are not that many.

Anecdotally the worst McDonalds Burger I had was with a cold slice of cheese at the Berlin Main Station, while the Döner there was always above par.

INTPenis• 1 year ago

Not just commuters but tourists, people you can scam once and who will never be back.

When your falafelshop is in the neighborhood you can't be scamming people because you'll quickly become abandoned.

Rastonbury• 1 year ago

I have a hypothesis that "popular" restaurants in tourist heavy cities like Paris, London, Tokyo have google reviews are heavily skewed by these tourists. Basically any place that has over 1-2k reviews and 4.5+ becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. Sometimes you go into a supposedly local place and everyone seated around you is American. I tend avoid places with thousands of reviews therefore or when there are barely any reviews in the local language

macrael6• 1 year ago

OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality

mxfh3• 1 year ago

The point is, that quality is not the metric here; the metric is google ratings. I would take a place with a solid 4.6 but hundreds of ratings over a low double digit 4.9 any time.

decimalenough• 1 year ago

Döner in Berlin is like ramen in Tokyo: the competition is so furious that objectively bad places go out of business quickly.

mxfh3• 1 year ago

There are a few that are obviously some sort of front business. It can't be the Döner.

btilly• 1 year ago

Many years ago I came up with a rule of thumb. Restaurants have three basic strategies, be a known quantity (chain), have a good location, or be actually good.

I've found some gems by looking for the third category.

Given that "near the train" is a good location, that would support this theory.

robocat4• 1 year ago

Where does crappy restaurant fit into your taxonomy?

nh23423fefe• 1 year ago

its either mcdonalds (well known) or close to work (good location). i still eat at crappy restaurants if they have 1 good item.

we used to go a chinese place and we called it "spicy chicken." everything else on the menu was trash

golergka• 1 year ago

Good location or bankrupt. Just look at all the tourist trap restoraunts.

Scrapemist• 1 year ago

Have a good location

dsr_• 1 year ago

It's a maximum of two, not a minimum. The minimum is zero: low quality expensive food in an inconvenient location.

Luckily, those usually go out of business. Un-luckily, you may be a customer first.

asah2• 1 year ago

They are not mutually exclusive. Counter examples:

- Katz's deli in NYC is incredibly famous, in a great location, and actually has kickass pastrami. The trade-off are relatively high prices and lines down the block

- restaurants with exclusive relationships.

- restaurants that make money another way, e.g. gambling.

- family owned restaurants with legacy rent deals.

- restaurants that cater to niche audiences e.g. small ethnicities and religions

(And others, probably)

porphyra• 1 year ago

Probably one of the most famous examples is Jiro sushi which is in a subway station.

deanCommie• 1 year ago

They're not mutually exclusive because they're a triangle.

Cost, Convenience, Quality: Pick 2

This isn't that deep either - convenience and quality are 2 things that cost the restaurant money (either via higher rent, or more expensive ingredients).

You can't do all 3 because you'll never make a profit.

You can't do only 1 or you'll never get any customers.

Two is just right for both buyer and seller.

robot• 1 year ago

these examples are all exceptions. how much do the exceptions contribute to the discussion?

ghaff8• 1 year ago

Is Katz's actually a great location? It is for some--well, many/most places in Manhattan are a great location for some given the density--but it's hell and gone from Midtown, UES, etc. As someone who has visited Manhattan semi-regularly over the years (and even lived there for a summer) I think I've been to Katz's once and would never have described it as convenient.

ADDED: These days, sure, close to Lower East Side and Orchard Street but that sure wasn't primo real estate a few decades ago (including When Harry Met Sally was filmed).

acaloiar• 1 year ago

Comments of this quality are getting frustrating.

The grand parent post clearly stated it is the poster's "rule of thumb". By definition they are aware that the rules are [likely] "not mutually exclusive". Starting with "these are not mutually exclusive", is what makes this comment so unnecessary. Don't be proud of having listed exceptions to someone's rule of thumb.

Had you started with, "I like that; these are a few exceptions I've observed to your rules that I find interesting", that would be a productive way to start a conversation.

But starting with "these are not mutually exclusive" makes you seem like an ass for having pointed at an exception to something that by definition has exceptions.

It's right in the posting guidelines [1.]

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

[1.] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hattmall2• 1 year ago

I think it's probably even more close to being the opposite. Well known Restaurants in great locations tend to actually be very good. I think being good and in a good location leads to restaurants being well known. But I also think people claim Chick-fil-a and McDonald's aren't good are lying to themselves. Those restaurants routinely focus-group their food and make sure that it's ranked very high for taste and not just among their fast food counterparts. It an acquired distaste for people not to like it.

jandrese• 1 year ago

One other:

- restaurants that are going to fail but have not done so quite yet

That covers a lot of restaurants. It's a business sector with a lot of churn. Many mediocre establishments hold on for a few years before they close.

RajT88• 1 year ago

Where I live, video slots have infiltrated many restaurants. It is weird!

Even some slightly fancy restaurants have a corner full of slot machines. They must make a small mint to offset putting off diners.

I know what you are thinking: This guy lives in Nevada. Nope. Illinois.

That last category seems to be growing as well nearby. There are 3 Uzbek restaurants in the neighboring towns. 3! All opened within a year of each other, I think.

macrael6• 1 year ago

OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality

FloorEgg• 1 year ago

Actually OP found a very small correlation between railway proximity and Google rating. The study didn't actually measure "quality"...

Also, the lowest scoring outliers were the closest proximity, which I think is noteworthy.

seanthemon• 1 year ago

My rule of thumb: if it has the name of the country, i expect the food to be at best sub-par i.e "Great Indian" (gave me wild food poisoning).

Second rule of thumb: if the milkshakes are good, the food will be good - almost never fails me.

ReptileMan2• 1 year ago

For kebab some comedian gave the best advice - look at the knuckles of the kebab maker - if they are very hairy it will be good. Then look at the neckline of his shirt - if there are hairs coming out of it - the kebab will be great.

zem• 1 year ago

I've been to several great restaurants with "china" and "burma" in their names. also "siam" and "thai" but not actually "thailand" that I can remember.

InitialLastName• 1 year ago

For a long time, the best Thai restaurant in New York State (in my, and many others', opinions) was called simply "Thai Cuisine".

rsynnott• 1 year ago

There’s a bizarrely good place in Dublin called China Sichuan (double whammy; country _and_ region), located in, basically, a business park 20 minutes from the city centre in a tram. It has no business being any good; combo of name and suburban location should condemn it to mediocrity at absolute best.

(They’ve also clearly spent a lot on the decor, which, again, is normally not a great sign in a restaurant. And yet somehow it’s very good. Against the natural order of things.)

98codes• 1 year ago

This supports the inverse square rule for seafood restaurant quality vs. being near the ocean. There are good places, but right on the water? Universally bad.

ghaff8• 1 year ago

Less true if you're talking about seafood "shacks." Tons of good places serving lobster rolls and steamers on the ocean in Maine for example. But, yes, for fancier restaurants especially in cities, the best views often don't come with the best food.

hackingonempty• 1 year ago

El Bulli was considered the best restaurant in the world until it voluntarily closed and it is right on the Mediterranean with a dock. The web site even had directions to reach it by boat.

munificent• 1 year ago

I wouldn't say universally bad. I live in Seattle, and there are some restaurants on the water that I like.

The way I think about it is this: the restaurant has to pay for the real estate, and that cost must get factored in somehow. Water views aren't cheap. So you can get good food on the water, but you'll be paying for the view.

hug• 1 year ago

If this were true, the best seafood in Australia would be in Alice Springs.

Conversely, I have one piece of life advice for you: Don't eat seafood in Alice Springs.

bluGill2• 1 year ago

Shipping of sea food is expensive so even the cheapest distant resteraunt will pay for premium prices since the difference isn't that much. Near the shore you can save buying cheap - but if you know what you are looking for you can buy the best off the boat for cheap.

ghc• 1 year ago

If this is true at all, it only applies to cities. Many fantastic seafood restaurants are on or near the docks in regions economically dependent on seafood production.

chadcmulligan• 1 year ago

My rule for finding a good restaurant - if it doesn't look that good and/or is in an out of the way place but seems to be busy, its probably good.

aqueueaqueue4• 1 year ago

My rule. Check TripAdvisor!

imgabe• 1 year ago

My only rule is that restaurants in hotels are usually mediocre to bad, which fits with your theory. If they have some built-in customer base they don’t have to work as hard at being good.

ghaff8• 1 year ago

It does vary. Some are more independent of the hotel than others. And the rule of thumb probably tends to be less true outside of the US.

xobs• 1 year ago

I remember reading an article that had the theory that Thai restaurants in hotels were usually very authentic under the assumption that the parents were immigrants who wanted the child to inherit the business, but the kid wanted to run a restaurant instead. It would certainly explain why you get Thai restaurants attached to random hotels in the middle of nowhere, at least.

cherryteastain• 1 year ago

Does not apply to the very top end where many luxury hotels also have Michelin starred fine dining restaurants

xattt• 1 year ago

Hotel restaurants are feature placebo. They are give the impression of added value/fanciness, even if they are rarely accessed by value-conscious guests.

JumpCrisscross5• 1 year ago

restaurants in hotels are usually mediocre to bad

This varies strongly region to region (and price level). In America and much of Europe, in most cases, yes. (Exception: tier 1 cities.)

In parts of Asia it varies from being almost rule to being a solid way to avoid great food. Put another way, go where the food-obsessed locals go. If the locals are dining at hotel restaurants, go there. If they're avoiding them for street food, do that.

On a parallel note, crappy little hotel bars are something of a delight to visit, particularly in your home town. You get to meet randos seeing your familiar through fresh eyes and for the first tie, and even if you don't meet anyone interesting, the people watching alone is usually paydirt.

janalsncm2• 1 year ago

The formal terminology is “selection induced negative correlation”. If a quality score is the sum of two factors, those two factors will tend to be negatively correlated.

Mathematically a trivial example is the equation 1=x+y, where 1 represents some cutoff and could be any value. Clearly x and y are inversely correlated.

fermisea• 1 year ago

Also a type of collider bias in causal inference, which generates all sorts of Simpsons paradoxes

morsecodist2• 1 year ago

Totally agree but I would expand location into convenience. For example, I find restaurants that don't take reservations or have limited hours are often better.

In my head I have a category for reliable restaurants to go to when you are planning something with people and you want to make sure to have a consistent, predictable experience and restaurants that are worth waiting for or going at a weird time.

MichaelDickens• 1 year ago

Based on the empirical evidence from OP, this seems correct. But there's a theoretical argument for why "good location" and "actually good" should be positively correlated:

1. Good locations are more expensive.

2. People are willing to pay more for better food.

3. Therefore (all else equal), better restaurants earn more revenue.

4. Therefore, better restaurants have a higher willingness-to-pay on rent.

5. Therefore, better restaurants will outbid worse restaurants for good locations.

MattGaiser• 1 year ago

You lost me at point 4. Why would more revenue mean a higher willingness to pay rent unless it made them more profit?

morsecodist2• 1 year ago

This falls apart a bit if providing better food costs more. Restaurants with better food may earn more revenue all else being equal but their costs may be higher. People are willing to pay more for the same quality of food in a better location. It makes sense for a the restaurant with worse food to outbid a restaurant with better food because the location is more important to them and they are allocating more money towards towards rent rather than food quality so they have more to spend.

hot_gril13• 1 year ago

This is how I think of it too. In a popular location, the restaurants won't necessarily be the best, but they'll be better on average.

Also, compare any big city to its adjacent areas. Like everyone knows LA has better food than San Bernardino.

HolyLampshade• 1 year ago

I’d posit that closer proximity to drinking establishments would mean increased foot traffic with a less discerning clientele.

Every kebob is a good kebob when you’re a few drinks in.

carlosjobim2• 1 year ago

Your logic works in a world with only restaurants. In reality, every other type of business has better margins than restaurants and also competes for the best real estate. So the good restaurant in a good location is soon having their rent hiked and closing down, or has to follow the beaten path: Decrease quality and increase prices.

Sure, there's always exceptions, especially in older cities where the restaurant was established in a great spot a long time ago and is owned by a family. But generally, restaurants have far too low profit margins to remain for long in a top location. And I think all of us know this from experience.

JumpCrisscross5• 1 year ago

On location, consider discriminating by repeating versus non-repeating flow. Repeat flow tends to encourage good food. If you fuck up the food, you go out of business. Non-repeating flow encourages tourist traps.

I'd be curious about the article's study being re-run with a dummy variable for predominantly commuter versus tourist train stations.

hot_gril13• 1 year ago

I used to try random restaurants that don't look good, then I realized that they usually are in fact not good.

gamedever3• 1 year ago

good location = higher rent = food better attract people

I'm not saying that holds up, only that it's not clear to me that "good location" = skimping on actually being good.

To go the other extreme, I guess all the best restaurants in the USA are in Wyoming since they arguably have worst locations (low population density = low traffic) so they must have to concentrate on food. Yea, ... no.

glitchc• 1 year ago

The notable exception perhaps is Kings Cross Station in London. Food is generally excellent.

wftglf2• 1 year ago

Hmm but is it excellent for kebabs? I'm more a falafel person so can't really judge but I think crystal kebab is the only one and it doesn't do any form of deep fried chickpeas I rate the chinese place over the road though!

legitster• 1 year ago

This immediately reminds me of Tyler Cowen's book "An Economist Gets Lunch". He infers all sort of rules for profiling restaurant quality.

In fact, he makes this very observation - high foot traffic areas command higher rents, and it's harder to provide both good quality and good value where rents are high. But restaurants that can be successful without good real estate are a green flag.

macrael6• 1 year ago

OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality

function_seven• 1 year ago

You're doing important work throughout this thread. Thanks.

ggambetta• 1 year ago

In a similar vein, in Venice I developed this theory that you could estimate your distance to San Marco by the price of a slice of pizza (more expensive meaning closer). Never tested it, but would be fun to see a heatmap.

joshka• 1 year ago

A stronger hypothesis to test might be the statement: "the closest kebab to the station is worse than the next farther one", which would be the intuitive implied meaning of the original statement (even though it's not a perfectly accurate interpretation).

mdahardy• 1 year ago

Seems like a lot of this could be explained by better food tending to be served in locations with lower commercial real estate prices (I believe Tyler Cowen has written about this).

Kozmik12• 1 year ago

Has anyone tried Le Train Bleu inside Gare de Lyon station in Paris? It's a very fancy restaurant (French, obviously). Like many such places, the reviews are mixed, but it was plenty to impress my simpleton American expectations. Certainly a step up from the options one might find in Penn Station (at least to me)!

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g187147-d11097...

ghaff8• 1 year ago

I'm not sure there's a lot of interest in the US for fancy dining in transportation hubs. In fact, airports have generally moved away from fancier dining generally towards fast casual. There is some decent food in the new Moynihan train hall in Penn but certainly no fancy dining.

Not sure I disagree as a traveler.

jerlam• 1 year ago

Wouldn't it be "good, convenient, cheap - pick two" (at most)?

There can be good food near transportation hubs, but it will be more costly. It is difficult to filter out price as a factor in reviews because people can value their money differently, especially tourists.

smpnav• 1 year ago

On a slightly related note, what’s with the terrible quality kebabs in the UK? You go to Germany and it’s almost a completely different food.

macintux• 1 year ago

The ancient joke springs to mind.

Heaven is where the cooks are French, the police are British, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the cooks are British, the police are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.

stackedinserter• 1 year ago

And Canada is a place with American cuisine, French government and British technology.

Kozmik12• 1 year ago

My favorite German food is Turkish. My favorite British food is Lebanese.

gambiting2• 1 year ago

I don't know, I've lived here for a long time and I've been wondering this too. It's like the entire country has been brainwashed long time ago to call these blobs of minced meat that get shaved into skin-like strips kebab - every chippy in the country is guilty of this monstrosity. I'm glad some companies are now starting to appear that make a dent in this, I am forever thankful for a branch of GDK that opened in my city because that's literally the only place that doesn't serve this carboard imitation of a kebab, but yeah I don't get it. People just say "mate it's mint after a night out" - yeah, and so is the real thing???

seanalltogether• 1 year ago

At least where I live in the UK, kebabs are treated as drunk food, not lunch food. This is completely different to the US where a gyro is treated as a lunch food and always seemed higher quality.

wftglf2• 1 year ago

Disappointed to discover OP didn't actually go and eat in all the kebab shops.

nly• 1 year ago

The kebab shop in my local Tube station in London used to wrap his kebabs in free bakery counter bags stolen from the local Tesco. Presumably to save on costs.

I don't mind saying it was the worst kebab I've ever had.

ReptileMan2• 1 year ago

Worst kebab in London is highly competitive race with no need for handicaps.

vzaliva2• 1 year ago

This is a good example where a summary produced by much-hated AI (GPT 4o) is quite useful (to people who do not want to read all details in he article):

"In his study, James Pae examined the hypothesis: "The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab." Focusing on Paris, he analysed kebab shops' proximity to train and metro stations alongside their Google review ratings. His findings revealed a negligible correlation between a kebab shop's distance from stations and its review ratings, suggesting the hypothesis lacks substantial evidence. Pae acknowledges potential influencing factors such as tourism and review biases and expresses intentions to revisit the study for further analysis."

pocketarc• 1 year ago

I don't think a lot of people have a problem with AI summaries (a lot of people are using AI for exactly that). I think the 'hate' mostly comes from the fact that people tend to copy/paste whatever AI says without adding anything to the conversation.

It's the same as me running a query on Google and copy/pasting a list of 10 results. It doesn't really add anything to a conversation - anyone can go to Google and look something up.

sockmeistr• 1 year ago

For what it's worth, I do hate people pasting their AI summaries to the comments. Not only are they adding nothing, they are actively detracting from the conversation; they have just pasted a wall of text without fact-checking it. And in fact, this "summary" misrepresents the article; it completely ignores the humor and presents it as a serious scientific endeavour.

But judging from the rest of the comments, it seems like most people barely managed to finish reading the title, so perhaps there's no need to worry about them reading this AI slop...

tredre3• 1 year ago

Asking a question to a coworker and having him copy paste from chatgpt has to be the worst thing about being a programmer in 2025.

If I'm asking you something it's because I want to discuss it, not because I couldn't be bothered to google it myself. Do people really not realize that?

brachistochron• 1 year ago

at some point of my life I was working on improving search results for the query "restaurant"

for solving the problem of reviews not representing kebab taste, you can put reviews through the llm and ask it silple question - does it say that kebab is good or bad, or it is not about the taste at all

given then a set of labeled reviews, you can very reliably devise the label you need

you also can widen your top funnel with the approach, as it is agnostic to category, name, etc.

JmsPae3• 1 year ago

Hi there, "OP" here.

First off, it's been fun to see this post spread across the interwebs since I first wrote it one caffeine-fueled day just over a week ago (first Menéame, now here) and for the heck of it, I thought I would clarify a few things;

This post was (sortof) a meme. Sure, I "understood the assignment" and performed the quick "study" ("analysis" might be more fitting) for the sake of the original post over on r/gis, but I was surprised to see how seriously others took the matter. I suppose good kebabs are a serious matter.

As others have pointed out, a linear correlation was likely a flawed approach for testing the "hypothesis". Though the original wording from the french post which first brought this to my attention implied as much, in hindsight it's likely that the kebab shops within a certain radius are on average worse than the rest.

Also, it seemed that Paris was one of the worse study areas. It, apparently, has some very good kebab shops that just so happen to be in close proximity to train stations.

I suppose I need to start working on part 2....

dr_kiszonka• 1 year ago

Try fitting something non-linear or simply plot a mean (or median) rating over distance with some smoothing.

wjholden2• 1 year ago

Which R-Tree Rust library were you referring to?

JmsPae3• 1 year ago

https://github.com/georust/rstar

Banger library. Not sure how it compares to, say, kd-tree in terms of performance but it allows for plenty of primitives.

lqet4• 1 year ago

Why did you include metro stations in your study? The original quote only included train stations. The metro originally largely replaced a tram network, so the metro station density in Paris is higher than for other underground systems. I think it is very hard to find kebap shops in Paris that are not within 500 m of a metro station. This kind of dilutes the significance of your study, because I never really noticed that metro stations had a negative impact on their surrounding area (the opposite, really).

I think your study would have been much more interesting (but not that algorithmically challenging...) if you only included the large train stations in Paris.

maeln• 1 year ago

I would second this. In Paris, but I find it to be true in most European city, the area surrounding train station is usually not very nice. It is usually surrounded by cheap hotel for 1-night traveler, overpriced fast food (hence the initial theory) and social housing / cheap building (a lot of people don't want to live next to a train station due to the nuisance, so poor people often get stuck there).

On the other hand, metro station are pretty much anywhere, and they tend to have the opposite effect. Having a metro station close by is very practical and doesn't generate as much nuisance since it is underground and pretty well hidden.

I am almost sure the data will look very different if you only look for train station.

JmsPae3• 1 year ago

I thought to include metro stations mostly because of the nature of the original French subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/MetroFrance/comments/1hcifh1/pas_vu...). It perhaps doesn't make much sense in hindsight, but I also filtered out metro stations later on in the post and it didn't change much.

I'm starting work on a follow-up which will sample more cities, though I still plan to use walking distances w network analysis for now.

HelloNurse• 1 year ago

Seconded. Train stations are important attractors for some kinds of people and some kinds of eating place, metro stations (particularly relatively small and uniformly distributed ones, as is the case in Paris) are only able to give a restaurant an easily reachable position, only for metro travellers, compared to others in the neighbourhood. Different effects, good for a different study.

randomcarbloke2• 1 year ago

please do berlin, london, and stockholm.

vanderZwan3• 1 year ago

Yeah, this is a nice selection of European cities to compare!

Having lived in Berlin and Stockholm (and a few other cities), I'd say Stockholm has by far the worst kebab options of all places I've lived, while Berlin was the best one.

I'm curious whether this is reflected in local reviews, or whether the locals just lower or heighten their standards based on the what the average food quality is like.

percevalve• 1 year ago

That looks like a typical collider bias to me... There should be no correlation between location and quality... But as you are looking at restaurant that are still "in business" you are introducing a bias. If you simplify, a restaurant can have : - good/bad location - good/bad food

If your restaurant has bad location and bad food, it is not going to stay in business very long.

After that you can have a mix of all, but if you remove the "bad/bad" restaurant there is a correlation that appears, but it is due to the collider bias.

TeMPOraL4• 1 year ago

if you remove the "bad/bad" restaurant there is a correlation that appears, but it is due to the collider bias.

This sounds like the correlation appears because of you throwing away some data, but the way I see it, that correlation is real - you're not removing the bad/bad restaurants, the market is.

I've been reading up on collider bias on Wiki and pondering the examples[0] - restaurants, dating, celebrities - and the way I see it, the biased statistics is still true for whoever is doing the classification (person visiting fast-food restaurants, or looking for a date), and if their selection (taste) generalizes, it might also carry over to the general population.

I feel the restaurant example from Wiki, with its associated image below, is worth discussing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox#/media/Fil...

"An illustration of Berkson's Paradox. The top graph represents the actual distribution, in which a positive correlation between quality of burgers and fries is observed. However, an individual who does not eat at any location where both are bad observes only the distribution on the bottom graph, which appears to show a negative correlation."

This feels wrong to me. Why is the regression line nearly horizontal when, eyeballing the graph, a nearly vertical one would fit better and capture an even stronger positive correlation between qualities of hamburgers and fries? In fact, I'm tempted to even throw away the leftmost and rightmost points on the lower panel as outliers.

Anyway, this example assumes the bad/bad restaurants are not visited by the subject - however, if we take your scenario where bad/bad restaurants quickly go out of business, then it's the market that creates the correlation between those two hypothetically independent qualities, so as long as we're talking real world and not some imaginary spherical restaurants in frictionless vacuum, it would be fair to say the correlation exists (and that the causal mechanism behind it is market selection).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

drpixie• 1 year ago

Paris is a special case - you've got a great metro and everywhere is close to a station :)

Perhaps distance to a non-metro station (eg a TER "mainline" station like Gare du Nord) would give more representative results?

I wait with interest.

larodi• 1 year ago

I’d love to see more spatial sql applied. As a side effect tbh your code may get shorter. Even though R and Python are type go-to langs for ML, it is SQL which excels at spatial analysis.

isoprophlex• 1 year ago

I just want to tell you that it's very well written, well done!

With a mighty Pearson's correlation of 0.091, the data indicates that this could be true!

I almost choked on this bit, as I was eating a sandwich (not a kebab sadly)

3abiton• 1 year ago

I suppose I need to start working on part 2....

I'll wait for the ignobel paper.

paulorlando2• 1 year ago

When I moved to the West Village in NYC, the first night I went to a kebab place right by my building. The owner was talkative and friendly and gave me a free cup of ayran. I went back regularly, but the place was almost always empty. Meanwhile, visiting friends would always want to go to a different kebab place just down the block. For the first year I stayed loyal to that friendly kebab shop owner, until one day I went to the other kebab place. Long lines and... much better food! I never went back to the first one.

hackit2• 1 year ago

And the kebab circle of life is complete. People are ruthless when it comes to food prices/quality.

paulorlando2• 1 year ago

It was all quality. The food was so much better at the second place that even if the first place was free I wouldn't have gone back

joshdavham• 1 year ago

Awesome post! Also, I dig your writing style

I_dream_of_Geni• 1 year ago

"The best food in the world is made in France. The best food in France is made in Paris. And the best food in Paris, some say, is made by Chef Auguste Gusteau"

-quote from Ratatouille

hansvm• 1 year ago

TFA mentioned several ways in which Google reviews aren't an ideal tool here. Tossing out a couple more, you (1) don't have the same people giving reviews at each location, and (2) have a bias in those who choose to give reviews. As a point of anecdata about (1): Saturne in Paris (now closed) served some of the best food I've ever eaten, and it had lower ratings than a tourist-trap fish place on a pier near to where I live, even if you filter the reviews to only those describing the food.

I'd be interested in seeing the same analysis with other metrics of quality, like the proportion of negative reviews referencing food vs other things (or a wilson-scored version thereof).

hobofan• 1 year ago

There is also a bias in the rating range of a city. E.g. in Berlin when looking to go out to eat I'd look for 4.5 and above as it uses quite a wide range for ratings, while e.g. in Rome most time I'd be happy with a 4.0. There are many phenomena (in Rome probably high tourist expectations) that can skew the distribution of reviews in a way that makes it hard to use as a "quality" scale.

kewho• 1 year ago

Was confused about this part the last time I saw this posted online:

With a mighty Pearson's correlation of 0.091, the data indicates that this could be true!

This sounds like op thinks the data supports the hypothesis.

One would assume a negative result for the hypothesis would occur when there is a bias in the upper left quadrant, where shortest distance and highest score intersect, and looking at the graphs in figures 8 and 9, to me, there appears a bias there.

physhster• 1 year ago

There is an amazing kebab across the street from the Bordeaux train station. Your entire study is debunked!!

ralferoo• 1 year ago

I was hoping for a systematic and consistent reviews of many dozens of kebab shops in a certain metropolitan area.

Just basing any kind of research of reviews on the web is fundamentally flawed as only a tiny fraction of customers would ever review a restaurant - and usually reviews are overly biased negative from bad experiences, or biased positive by people being incentivised to leave good reviews by discounts or outright fake reviews, or some kind of average of the two. As such the actual results from these reviews are pretty meaningless, apart from the number of reviews which might correlate roughly with how likely a place is to be visited, good or bad. In this case, I think that will also probably correlate with proximity to stations, rather than the quality.

Naru41• 1 year ago

I'll be expecting my Nobel peace prize in the postbox and several job offers in my DMs within the next 3 working days.

This joke alone was worth the read.

pizlonator• 1 year ago

This made my day, it was science at its finest

stevage3• 1 year ago

There are many aspects of the dining experience that could hypothetically impact a review score. The staff, cleanliness, the surrounding environment, etc. Not to mention online skulduggery and review manipulation.

Don't Google Maps reviews separately measure food, "ambience" and service? Is it not possible to access the food component directly?

JumpCrisscross5• 1 year ago

Don't Google Maps reviews separately measure food, "ambience" and service? Is it not possible to access the food component directly?

It's debatable whether these components can actually be segregated that way. In practice, no, every review system is plagued with reviews in the form of 'delicious food, lovely staff, but another table was too loud one star.'

stevage3• 1 year ago

True. Everyone has the one thing they care about. I care about ambience. I barely notice the food.

coryaf• 1 year ago

For the Americans - by kebab it means gyro

whywhywhywhy• 1 year ago

Kebab and Gyro are pretty different in terms of bread, salad, sauce and even meat.

hot_gril13• 1 year ago

Also, Americans all know what kebab is, but not the case with gyro

Gabriel54• 1 year ago

Tangential, and not a train station, but one of the best Turkish şiş kebabs I ever had was at Esenler Otogar (bus station) in Istanbul. The station is something out of a horror movie, but if you go up to the second floor there are some fantastic little places to eat.

m0llusk• 1 year ago

this thread is making me very hungry

hot_gril13• 1 year ago

Cash only => good. "Bistro" in the name => bad.

jaydeegee• 1 year ago

Finally someone using GIS data for the great good of humanity.

Horffupolde• 1 year ago

This was discussed by Taleb as “I’d rather my surgeon be ugly and not look like George Clooney.”

throwawayk7h• 1 year ago

Try correcting for density first.

protocolture2• 1 year ago

There was briefly a fad where a person would review "HSP's" from every kebab store in their area, it might be easier to use a single users spread of reviews rather than average review scores.

lukaslalinsky• 1 year ago

I think it's clear from the plots, that the closer you are to a train station, the more bad kebab shops you will find. That's why it's easy for humans to make the original assumption.

mytailorisrich• 1 year ago

That's a massive number of kebab shops in Paris...

lqet4• 1 year ago

I could've absolutely just routed to every single entrance for every single restaurant to get the nearest... But that would've taken several decades.

Hm, this seems like a standard many-to-many routing problem on a relatively small road network (only Paris). Why would this take several decades? Even if you just implemented a straightforward Dijkstra without any speed-up technique, it should take not more than a minute (you can trivially compute routes from N to M places using N Dijkstra runs).

shoo• 1 year ago

you can trivially compute routes from N to M places using N Dijkstra runs

to do even better, you can compute the shortest path & distance to M kebab shops from the nearest of N train stations using a single run of a standard shortest path algorithm like Dijkstra, by changing the initial condition of the search to start from a set of multiple source nodes, not a single source node.

another way to think about this is to take the graph and augment it with an additional virtual root node and add length 0 edges from that virtual root node to each of the N train stations, then use that virtual root node as the source for a single-source Dijkstra.

alternatively, modify the original graph by merging all the train station nodes together into one node (if this introduces self-loop edges, delete them, if this introduces multi-edges between same pair of nodes, delete all but a minimal length one)

jillesvangurp2• 1 year ago

Here in Berlin there are an enormous amount of kebab places (thousands). Basically, most places are embedded in neighborhoods and have a crowd of locals that go there. The quality varies wildly as a lot of these places are obviously aimed at the money laundering business (cash only) rather than serving food. Poor hygiene, indifferent service, etc. Many of these places are completely pointless from a business point of view. Other than the money laundering thing. They are easy to recognize since they look kind of old and dirty and there are usually not a lot of customers. If it's lunch/dinner time and nobody is eating, maybe skip it.

And then there are some really outstanding places with proper char coal grills, staff that knows what they are doing and are friendly and laser focused on customer service. These places are wonderful and generally good value. Some of these marinade their own meat as well and they venture beyond just serving the standard kebabs. If you find yourself in Berlin, worth getting some advice on where to go in your area. There are some amazing kebab restaurants and most of those places have been around for ages.

And then there's a third category of places that you find in the usual late night and travel hot spots targeting travelers or people that are drunk that will probably not be regulars. Competition for this audience is fierce and there are some good choices here that people will take detours for to get to. Many of these places are well run and optimize for throughput and consistency (but not necessarily high quality).

skrebbel2• 1 year ago

Pardon my ignorance, but I always wonder how these money laundering kebab places work. We have some in my city too and they always leave me puzzled. If nobody eats there, how do they launder money? I'm probably daft/naieve but can't figure out the mechanics of money laundering when the business doesn't actually move any product.

timvdalen• 1 year ago

They pretend like people _do_ eat there, that's how the dirty cash ends up in the register.

tinco2• 1 year ago

You have money you can't explain to the IRS how you got it, that's dirty money. Now you use some clean money to buy a kebab shop. Every day you give your dirty money to the kebab shop, the kebab shop prints fake receipts. Now the IRS can be convinced the money came from cash in hand customers.

jclulow• 1 year ago

The point is generally to recover cents on the dollar from money you can't otherwise use. Imagine you have a network of people moving illegal drugs. They collect money from their customers, and they need to pay it to you, the supplier. Arrange for them to eat a lot of food at your restaurant. Maybe they shout their friends. The money goes into the restaurant, and is mingled with other money. That money is used to pay costs for the business, but some of it is still profit. That profit, while less than the illegal input money, is _clean_ money, which is much more valuable because you can spend it without fear generally.

It's really just about making it harder for law enforcement folks to draw associations by looking directly at the bank accounts of several people they suspect are in cahoots. Or, in some cases, about making it harder to trace specific cash serial numbers or other instruments like cheques.

I recall reading of a crime outfit in Australia that would have the elders in their family take their illicit cash and use it to place an endless stream of bets on poker machines. By law they're required to return some high percentage, say, 75%, of the money put into them (the house keeps the rest). If you gamble tens of thousands in those machines, and you don't care about the losses, you get a reasonable expectation value back out as laundered winnings. In that case you don't even have to own the pub with the pokies, that's just how they work.

shizzor• 1 year ago

They already have the money, they just need a business as a facade to claim the money was earned by running the business. But you are right, eventually it would be suspicious if they only sold food but never bought the matching raw ingredients. That's probably why they now moved to barber shops - nobody knows or can prove you didn't cut the hair of the hundreds of people that were never there.

lqet4• 1 year ago

If nobody eats there, how do they launder money?

The laundered money is reported to the tax office as cash payments from customers. Add some fake invoices from meat suppliers to make your books look legit, and you have converted dirty money into clean, even taxable income.

This only works to a certain degree, though. If the tax office becomes suspicious, they will definitely use undercover people to count customers and meat deliveries over a few weeks. But if for example only 10% of your sales volume is fake, it is quite hard for the tax office to prove this. For smaller laundry volumes, you don't even need fake supplier bills, you can always just claim that you put a bit less meat on the kebap, etc. The general idea is to take advantage of the fact that even the tax office acknowledges that it is impossible to keep books accurate to the last penny in such businesses.

When I was a student I often ate pizza in a really nice Italian restaurant which later turned out to be a money laundering front for the Mafia. But the pizza was great!

jillesvangurp2• 1 year ago

All cash transactions with essentially no/sloppy bookkeeping. Receipts optional. Money goes in, taxes are declared but it doesn't necessarily all add up. So they mix in some non clean revenue and it all comes out as income.

auselen• 1 year ago

I think there is some exaggeration

obviously aimed at the money laundering business

Places also provide facade to some social networks. They can keep relatives having a job, can act like a store front for doing whatever deal.

I accept they don’t survive by just serving food, but some of it basically just bad business or some guys to have a legit place for other activities.

jon-wood• 1 year ago

As an example of something similar happening, my family and I once went to a little village in the middle of Bulgaria to visit a family fried, and booked a hotel room for the week. This was a huge hotel, next door to another huge hotel, serving a village with a population of a few hundred people.

At one point our friend told us it was well known that both were owned by the local mafia. If you were to check the books you'd find the place was fully booked every day of the year and doing a roaring trade, while if you actually went and visited you'd find 3 slightly bemused looking English people and maybe a wedding party.

Beretta_Vexee3• 1 year ago

Although no one eats there, he declares 50 kebab sales, the purchase of a frozen kebab skewer and bread rolls, etc. The raw materials will either be thrown away or sold on to another real restaurant. But to pass the checks, the purchases of raw materials must be consistent with the sales. The 50 sales are made with cash from drug trafficking. The simpler the activity, the fewer raw materials and the bigger the margins, the better. Amsterdam has its Nutella waffle stands, Berlin its kebabs, Paris its nail bars and massage parlours.

eddiewithzato• 1 year ago

Pretty sure it’s mostly for tax dodging than money laundering. Less risky too

JR1427• 1 year ago

After a ten second glance, it looks like there are simply more kebab shops close to stations, and therefore a larger sample from which to see a broader range of ratings (including bad ones).

rcpt• 1 year ago

not in the mood to build a web scraper (it has the same soul-sucking effect on me as prompting an LLM)

I guess the joke is that nowadays you crawl pages by prompting and LLM

higeorge13• 1 year ago

It's extremely funny that this is accurate for souvlaki in Greece. :) On the contrary, I was amazed by the quality of food in stations in Japan. Some "shady" shops there had some of the best ramen/udon I had in Japan.

qq66• 1 year ago

It makes logical sense. The closer a shop is to the train station, the more it pays in rent, requiring it to skimp on ingredient quality.

setr• 1 year ago

Presumably they’d have higher traffic to offset the rent increase. I would expect more quality damage from the fact that they effectively have guaranteed minimum traffic ala airports

skrebbel2• 1 year ago

It's not true though!

Justta• 1 year ago

It's case old saying lost it's relevance. This is absolutely correct in developing countries which only has one main railway station or bus stand for the whole city or town. These establishments targeted one time customer who will never return in a year. Including metro is not valid or violation of the actual circumstance this saying originated. Including Mtro and even if still counting walkable distance of 100 m from the station almost covers the whole city. Doing this in Paris with more strict enforcement of food safety and quality isn't really going to validate.

josefrichter• 1 year ago

One sub-hypothesis to add: people getting off the train are more hungry than general population + hungry people generally give more favourable reviews :-)

einpoklum2• 1 year ago

A study of life as limited and filtered to the Google-verse. I disapprove.

InDubioProRubio2• 1 year ago

Best Döner i ever eaten, was a small turkish kiez kebap in one of berlins backyard streets - they roasted the hell out of that chicken döner and you got only crust. Worst war lunch rushhour large chain kebap near the chinese embassy.

hinkley4• 1 year ago

This seems like a clear case of survivor bias. When you’re near commuters and infrequent visitors, accessibility is a quality all of its own. As long as you don’t become infamous, you’re gonna get traffic.

The farther I have to travel to get to the food, the more motivation I’m gonna need. I’ll go pretty far for my favorite Korean food or for my buddy’s favorite doner, but if I’ve got a meeting in 30 minutes then I’m going to the least objectionable of the four closest places. And as easily nerd sniped as I am, let’s be honest that’s happening at least once a week, which is probably more often than I go to the good places.

alexalx666• 1 year ago

more please

evanb• 1 year ago

For an exception, Kebapland in Ehrenfeld, Cologne is in the shadow of the mainline rails to Aachen and on top of the Ehrenfeld U-Bahn. It has the hands-down best kebap (and euro-for-euro meal) found in Köln.

This is not a paid endorsement, it's just insanely good.

philjw• 1 year ago

Finally - this was long term observation I conducted in many cities so far (Check Utrecht, The Hague, Valencia, Frankfurt- often the case you have <4 star kebab shops right next to train station) . If not true for kebab on broader scale, it surely is for McDonalds / Burger King: They use their position / monopoly, no coupons accepted, higher prices - and in some cases not even a seating area. A true real life dark pattern right there.

I also rated some of them with 1 star because fast food seemed to have degenerated to "being stuck in waiting line with gigworkers collecting food for other people"-food. Not the best experience when you're on a mission to catch the next train in 15 minutes and they let you wait. @BigFastFoodChain if you read this - Have an extra menu with a category "Super Fast Food" or "Ready & Available in under a minute" that enables people in frequented locations to use their time better. Also goes for supermarkets - add self check-outs!

sdushane2• 1 year ago

https://maps.app.goo.gl/7imPTP88PrYLpABb9

Best kebob in Stain-Denis, maybe all of Paris. Not close to train.

sdushane2• 1 year ago

https://maps.app.goo.gl/7imPTP88PrYLpABb9 Best I've tried in Paris - Saint-Denis. Not near train.

account422• 1 year ago

Besides the other mentioned issues, using average user rating as a proxy of quality is something that needs at least an argument why you expect the ratings to be comparable. Consider that for example shops near a train station will see a lot more one-off customers who might be inclined to rate differently compared to the shop's neighbors.

dudefeliciano• 1 year ago

kinda related, there is this guy in Berlin who reviews all the kebab places closest to each subway station https://www.youtube.com/@CanF.Kennedy

machine_ghost• 1 year ago

So, this is anecdotal, and it's not true at the moment (because the end of the Santa Cruz wharf just fell into the ocean, and now the clam chowder restaurants are closed), but ...

... I had an ex who was a huge clam chowder fan, so she did her own "experiment" and tried every chowder-serving restaurant on the Santa Cruz wharf (I think there were seven).

Her completely unscientific finding was that the very best chowder was at the end of the wharf, and generally speaking the chowder got worse as you got closer to the start of the pier (ie. the closest place to The Boardwalk ... where all the tourists come).

It makes perfect sense to me: if people come to your restaurant because of its location, you don't put much effort into quality. If you're far from the walk-in traffic, you need to do something (like make really delicious chowder) to get people to walk out to you.

ubermonkey• 1 year ago

I find it difficult to compare this to real world results, because where I live has neither train stations nor kebabs.

Alifatisk• 1 year ago

I was hoping when clicking on the article that they would also reveal new ways or collecting data of restaurants and their menus nearby, damn. Very fun article to read anyways!

Would overpass turbo maybe be a better alternative for finding specifics things depending of multiple clauses geographically?

tankenmate• 1 year ago

It could be a one way correlation; i.e. the only way a bad kebab restaurant can survive is to be near a train station.

registeredcorn• 1 year ago

I was actually expecting to see data that would refute the initial claim in the reverse! The outcome was not at all what I was expecting.

The assumption that I had made was, "More foot traffic = more customers = more reviews = higher overall rating". I was expecting to see a very high score close to train stations, and a hard slope the further you went from stations. My thinking was that location would heavily favor the rating, both in terms of convenience for customers, and in terms of non-Parians eating the food, because they are on vacation, traveling, etc. as the author had mentioned. I figured that if they are in higher spirits, they would leave higher reviews.

After seeing the results, it does make me wonder if this might have still played a role, but to a lesser degree? Hard to say, given how scattered it all is. Botting really does ruin metrics like this.

Personally, I think, it would be interesting to see something like the following in part 2:

1) Distance from station and proximity of kebab shop to bars/nightclubs. Perhaps someone who is drunk, and plans on taking the metro back to a hotel is likely to think a kebab is far better, compared to one who is further away from heavy drinking and further away from transportation. Both of those things being removed would make me think the overall review would be lower, but I think the actual ratings would be far more accurate, and more likely given by Native Parisians (assuming it's by a neighborhood, or whatever.)

2) It would be interesting to see what the impact is, in terms of amount of reviews reviews, the further away a kebab shop is from a station.

For example: If we are to assume that kebab_1 and keba_2 both open within six months of one another, but one is 1km from a station, while the other is almost on the platform, how much will that impact the number of reviews received?

3) Finally, it might also be interesting to hear what other food review websites that might offer this type of information. I assume the French have at least one French-centric social media platform for food reviews, which you can (hopefully) grab data from. How does that sites info compare to Google?

3a) Other nations food review sites might be interesting, too. My understanding is that Iran and Turkey are both very passionate about kebab, I could imagine them have thorough reviews of Parisian kebab shops. I could also see Japan having a pretty passionate food review site, given how crazy the Japanese can get for France, Paris in particular. I.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome

4) Perhaps there would be some interesting datapoints to pull out based on places that have closed permanently. That is, "Is a kebab shop that is close to a station more likely to stay open, or close down?"

dakial1• 1 year ago

I have a similar theory for restaurants at prime tourist location, the closer it is, the worse the food and service are.

And it kind of makes sense, as:

1) The real state is obviously more expensive, so little money left for the rest

2) The traffic is given, people walk in even if the place is on fire, so no pull is needed

I think a good test for this would be lookin at michelin star restaurants (better than gmaps)

“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

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