Maybe it’s because it’s the 4th of July, or maybe it was the constant stream of firecrackers and thunder last night as I was watching Decoding Ferran Adria that has my brain fried — I don’t know –, but I’m feeling rebellious today. Both Citysearch and Willamette Week are soliciting votes for their annual “Best Of”. Call me a snob if you will, but generally I despise such things.
1) I generally prefer the opinions of experts. I don’t ask my neighbor what I should do about the rash on my groin; I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I want to know where the best pad thai is, at minimum, I want the opinion of someone who has eaten a lot of pad thais in town, and preferably has some experience eating especially good pad thais in cities like LA or Bangkok.
2) The “Zagat Effect”. These surveys are self-perpetuating. Citysearch users see what gets rated the best, they visit those thinking they’re the best, they don’t go to many, if any, others, and next year they vote for them because they’re what they know. And it builds and builds on itself becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. (Plus, Citysearch puts the “nominees” in order of how they’ve been rated, giving those an enormous advantage.)
3) Restaurants cheat. Peruse the categories and you’ll see a few restaurants that are in half the categories. You’ll see places you’ve eaten at and know are garbage. You’ll see Thai restaurants listed in the dessert category above bakeries. Why? Because restaurants cheat. It’s enough of an advantage that most of the newsletters from restaurants I’ve been receiving include a request for readers to vote for them online. But some restaurants take it a step further and vote day after day, encouraging their staffs to do the same.
So what’s a conscientious objector to do? Throw a tea party, of course — Boston style. Fight fire with fire. Cheat in the name of the underdog, the good guy. The following is how to stuff the ballot at Citysearch, and I encourage you all to do so.
1) Vote. Go to Citysearch Portland’s best of, look through the categories, find places you like, and then vote. To return to a restaurant, you can just go to its profile by bookmarking it or copying its address. For example, if you wanted to vote for New York New York in either pizza or sandwich, you would just go to its profile and then at the right side of the screen is a box listing the categories it’s nominated in. See image above. Note that some of your favorites are likely not to be nominated. In that case, you have to search for them in the text box at the bottom of the category page, find their entry (if they even have one) and then nominate them. After you’re done, close your browser windows.
2) Delete Citysearch cookies. On Windows with Internet Explorer, which will be most of you, click “Tools” on the menu bar and drop down to “Internet Options”. Click the “General” tab if it’s not already selected and then click the button titled “Settings”. Now click “View Files”. The Temporary Internet Files folder will open with a list of files. Click “View” on the menu bar, then drop down to “Details”. This will give you an easy to read list of the files in the folder. Click “View” on the menu bar again, drop down to “Arrange Icons By” and a menu will open. Select “Name”. Now all your cookies will be together in the window. Browse the window until you find the cookies. They all begin with “Cookie:”. Look for the ones that have “citysearch.com” in them. There will usually be two or three if you’ve already voted. See the image above. Delete those. You can leave this window open to avoid having to re-open it in the future. (If you use Firefox or a similar browser, go here to see about deleting cookies. If you have a Mac running Safari, go here.)
3) Repeat.
It sounds more complicated than it is. This whole process shouldn’t take more than a minute unless you’re voting in a lot of categories at a time.
Here are some of my darkhorse picks:
Best Barbeue: Ken’s Place
Best Cheap Eats: Bahn Cuon Tan Dinh
Best Mexican: Autentica
Best Thai: Siam Society
These are all places that don’t get as much business as they deserve and aren’t currently even in the top 10 listed. Hopefully that will change, but there isn’t much time left and the cheaters have a big head start.
But if you’d rather, vote for the most objectionable, piece of garbage restaurant you can imagine. If you want to hop on an already hurtling pile of you-know-what, Stockpot Broiler, like last year, is tops in several categories, probably as the result of ballot stuffing by their employees or owners. It’s like writing in Alfred E Neuman for president. The more absurd the result, the less cachet it carries.
