14 ms·

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

586 points by TeMPOraL 2y ago

bigfatkitten 2y 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 2y ago
  Sometimes in another office building's lobby.
- madcaptenor 2y ago
  The coffee from the machine in the office is even worse.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Visit us. You'll be surprised. :D
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Now find the correlation to the quality of coffee to how recent the latest funding round was.
      - bayindirh 2y ago
        We buy our own coffee and equipment. The quality is constant. The only variable is our mood, which might affect the measurement from jug to jug, resulting in slight taste variations.
  - nkrisc 2y 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.
- macrael 2y ago
  OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
  - energy123 2y ago
    OP failed to reject the null hypothesis of no correlation at the given power level.
calmbonsai 2y 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.
- macrael 2y ago
  OP found no correlation
  - dietr1ch 2y 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.
    - serial_dev 2y ago
      Reviews have a lot of noise, but it feels like it’s still the best source, unless anyone can recommend a better alternative. Reviews are the worse way to test this hypothesis except all the others.
      - dietr1ch 2y ago
        > Reviews have a lot of noise, but it feels like it’s still the best source, unless anyone can recommend a better alternative. I honestly hate this take, sure, it might be the best (easily available, broad enough thing), but it's not my point, I'm not shutting this down, but giving a remark on what kind of drawbacks should be considered when analysing this, not because it's probably the best you should assume it's perfect.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Not true -- restaurant reviews have a lot of signal. Generally an average score is quite reliable once you hit 100 or so reviews. Even 50 reviews is a pretty decent signal.
jdiez17 2y ago
Looking at their actual results (https://preview.redd.it/znmnejgab5je1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=d8c83f3db2a25d4410b8f558b3ac31c7b3b29529 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  > I think they consider "pepperoni" and "salami" Mate, spicy snags are spicy snags Edit: Used the actual aussie word for sausages...
- crazygringo 2y ago
  To be fair, pepperoni is literally just spicy salami. Salami with hot peppers added. Hence the "pepper" in the name.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    > Hence the "pepper" in the name. Pepperomi doesn't quite have the same ring to it
- immibis 2y 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.
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janwillemb 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
    At the end of article it's shown that only considering train stations didn't really change the result.
  - HanayamaTriplet 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
myheartisinohio 2y ago
The only place this isn't true is Japan.
- bayindirh 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
    > it's not true in general if you actually read the article. Only if you agree with the article's methodology :)
- drchickensalad 2y ago
  Honestly NYC has a lot of its best restaurants by train stations, throughout every borough.
thebruce87m 2y 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-d12546759-Reviews-Best_Kebab-Glasgow_Scotland.html 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
- Glawen 2y 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
- Boogie_Man 2y ago
  For context: "Knifey Chaseies" is an historic pastime in Glasgow where this shop is located. An immigrant flare to a local tradition!
macrael 2y 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 2y ago
  The more generally interesting a topic is the more likely a HN user is to read the article. A study.
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  - tialaramex 2y 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 2y ago
    I only read articles with headlines that describe informative content, not with headlines that sound funny or thought-provoking.
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- daotoad 2y ago
  Would it help if I were to chime in with a response about the benefits of kebab case over train case?
  - btown 2y 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.
gnabgib 2y ago
Ongoing discussion (due to the SCP) (58 points, 7 hours/4 days ago, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43123810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43123810
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woodruffw 2y 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 2y 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.
  - woodruffw 2y 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!
lupusreal 2y ago
Kebabs are like cheese steaks; the best one is whichever is closest to wherever I am.
- gambiting 2y ago
  What's a cheese steak? Just a steak but with melted cheese on top? Doesn't that ruin the steak?
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    it would if it was actually a steak. for the type of meat you get on cheeesteaks - trust me - you want the cheese :)
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      Technically they're not allowed to call it cheese. ;)
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        lol
  - awad 2y 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 2y ago
I got sick off of train station sushi in Sydney. Never again
- billfor 2y ago
  Well you would be fine in Japan.
mxfh 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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
- macrael 2y ago
  OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
  - mxfh 2y 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.
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      I'm never going to look at ratings. The only use there is photos of menus, food, and the restaurant itself.
btilly 2y 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.
- macrael 2y ago
  OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
  - FloorEgg 2y 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.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      And probably understandable. Empirically, I don't really expect to find the best restaurants right around railway stations.
    - LorenPechtel 2y ago
      Yeah. The overall correlation was tiny but just looking at it you could see a pattern that's getting lost in the analysis.
- robocat 2y ago
  Where does crappy restaurant fit into your taxonomy?
  - nh23423fefe 2y 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
glitchc 2y ago
The notable exception perhaps is Kings Cross Station in London. Food is generally excellent.
- wftglf 2y 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 2y 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.
- macrael 2y ago
  OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
  - function_seven 2y ago
    You're doing important work throughout this thread. Thanks.
ggambetta 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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).
Kozmik1 2y 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-d1109767-Reviews-Le_Train_Bleu-Paris_Ile_de_France.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g187147-d11097...
- ghaff 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
    And Canada is a place with American cuisine, French government and British technology.
- Kozmik1 2y ago
  My favorite German food is Turkish. My favorite British food is Lebanese.
- gambiting 2y 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 2y 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.
nly 2y 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.
- ReptileMan 2y ago
  Worst kebab in London is highly competitive race with no need for handicaps.
wftglf 2y ago
Disappointed to discover OP didn't actually go and eat in all the kebab shops.
vzaliva 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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...
    - vzaliva 2y ago
      I read the article and fact-checked the summary before posting. The original article is quite long, so the summary may be useful for those who are intrigued by the title and just want to know the outcome. I don’t see any need to mention the "humor" aspect here. Many seemingly laughable hypotheses have turned out to be true when rigorously tested. The author did a good job investigating this one.
brachistochron 2y 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.
JmsPae 2y 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 2y ago
  Try fitting something non-linear or simply plot a mean (or median) rating over distance with some smoothing.
- wjholden 2y ago
  Which R-Tree Rust library were you referring to?
  - JmsPae 2y ago
    https://github.com/georust/rstar 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.
- lqet 2y 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.
paulorlando 2y 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 2y ago
  And the kebab circle of life is complete. People are ruthless when it comes to food prices/quality.
  - paulorlando 2y 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
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joshdavham 2y ago
Awesome post! Also, I dig your writing style
I_dream_of_Geni 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
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kewho 2y 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 2y ago
There is an amazing kebab across the street from the Bordeaux train station. Your entire study is debunked!!
ralferoo 2y 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 2y 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.
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pizlonator 2y ago
This made my day, it was science at its finest
stevage 2y 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?
- JumpCrisscross 2y 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.'
  - stevage 2y ago
    True. Everyone has the one thing they care about. I care about ambience. I barely notice the food.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > I care about ambience. I barely notice the food. I'm saying it's difficult if not impossible to disentangle these elements. The vibe, perhaps even the staffs' moods, will be in part a function of the diners. That, in turn, turns at least in part on the food. And vice versa--a place with a devout following that respects the kitchen staff will probably produce better food and ambiance, as both arise out of a sense of mutual respect. You may not care about the food directly. But if your barmate in a fun outfit with a contagious laugh does, that's part of the vibe you're there to feed on. (I love food. But I've sometimes found myself winnowing down a list of restaurant options by the lighting.)
coryaf 2y ago
For the Americans - by kebab it means gyro
- gaiagraphia 2y ago
  [flagged]
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  Kebab and Gyro are pretty different in terms of bread, salad, sauce and even meat.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    Also, Americans all know what kebab is, but not the case with gyro
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Gabriel54 2y 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 2y ago
this thread is making me very hungry
hot_gril 2y ago
Cash only => good. "Bistro" in the name => bad.
jaydeegee 2y ago
Finally someone using GIS data for the great good of humanity.
Horffupolde 2y ago
This was discussed by Taleb as “I’d rather my surgeon be ugly and not look like George Clooney.”
throwawayk7h 2y ago
Try correcting for density first.
bigbacaloa 2y ago
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protocolture 2y 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.
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lukaslalinsky 2y 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 2y ago
That's a massive number of kebab shops in Paris...
lqet 2y 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 2y 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)
jillesvangurp 2y 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).
- skrebbel 2y 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 2y ago
    They pretend like people _do_ eat there, that's how the dirty cash ends up in the register.
  - tinco 2y 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.
JR1427 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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
- skrebbel 2y ago
  It's not true though!
Justta 2y 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 2y ago
One sub-hypothesis to add: people getting off the train are more hungry than general population + hungry people generally give more favourable reviews :-)
einpoklum 2y ago
A study of life as limited and filtered to the Google-verse. I disapprove.
InDubioProRubio 2y 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.
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hinkley 2y 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 2y ago
more please
evanb 2y 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.
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powerofmAnNnyYy 2y ago
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philjw 2y 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!
sdushane 2y ago
https://maps.app.goo.gl/7imPTP88PrYLpABb9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/7imPTP88PrYLpABb9 Best kebob in Stain-Denis, maybe all of Paris. Not close to train.
sdushane 2y ago
https://maps.app.goo.gl/7imPTP88PrYLpABb9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/7imPTP88PrYLpABb9 Best I've tried in Paris - Saint-Denis. Not near train.
account42 2y 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 2y 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 https://www.youtube.com/@CanF.Kennedy
machine_ghost 2y 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 2y ago
I find it difficult to compare this to real world results, because where I live has neither train stations nor kebabs.
Alifatisk 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 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 2y 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)

586 points by TeMPOraL 2y 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 2y ago
Sometimes in another office building's lobby.
madcaptenor 2y ago
The coffee from the machine in the office is even worse.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  Visit us. You'll be surprised. :D
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Now find the correlation to the quality of coffee to how recent the latest funding round was.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      We buy our own coffee and equipment. The quality is constant. The only variable is our mood, which might affect the measurement from jug to jug, resulting in slight taste variations.
- nkrisc 2y 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.
macrael 2y ago
OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
- energy123 2y ago
  OP failed to reject the null hypothesis of no correlation at the given power level.

calmbonsai 2y 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.

macrael 2y ago
OP found no correlation
- dietr1ch 2y 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.
  - serial_dev 2y ago
    Reviews have a lot of noise, but it feels like it’s still the best source, unless anyone can recommend a better alternative. Reviews are the worse way to test this hypothesis except all the others.
    - dietr1ch 2y ago
      > Reviews have a lot of noise, but it feels like it’s still the best source, unless anyone can recommend a better alternative. I honestly hate this take, sure, it might be the best (easily available, broad enough thing), but it's not my point, I'm not shutting this down, but giving a remark on what kind of drawbacks should be considered when analysing this, not because it's probably the best you should assume it's perfect.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Not true -- restaurant reviews have a lot of signal. Generally an average score is quite reliable once you hit 100 or so reviews. Even 50 reviews is a pretty decent signal.

jdiez17 2y ago

Looking at their actual results (https://preview.redd.it/znmnejgab5je1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=d8c83f3db2a25d4410b8f558b3ac31c7b3b29529 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
> I think they consider "pepperoni" and "salami" Mate, spicy snags are spicy snags Edit: Used the actual aussie word for sausages...
crazygringo 2y ago
To be fair, pepperoni is literally just spicy salami. Salami with hot peppers added. Hence the "pepper" in the name.
- triceratops 2y ago
  > Hence the "pepper" in the name. Pepperomi doesn't quite have the same ring to it
immibis 2y 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.
- 2y ago

janwillemb 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  At the end of article it's shown that only considering train stations didn't really change the result.
- HanayamaTriplet 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.

myheartisinohio 2y ago

The only place this isn't true is Japan.

bayindirh 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  > it's not true in general if you actually read the article. Only if you agree with the article's methodology :)
drchickensalad 2y ago
Honestly NYC has a lot of its best restaurants by train stations, throughout every borough.

thebruce87m 2y 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-d12546759-Reviews-Best_Kebab-Glasgow_Scotland.html 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

Glawen 2y 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
Boogie_Man 2y ago
For context: "Knifey Chaseies" is an historic pastime in Glasgow where this shop is located. An immigrant flare to a local tradition!

macrael 2y 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 2y ago
The more generally interesting a topic is the more likely a HN user is to read the article. A study.
- deleted 2y ago
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- tialaramex 2y 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 2y ago
  I only read articles with headlines that describe informative content, not with headlines that sound funny or thought-provoking.
- deleted 2y ago
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daotoad 2y ago
Would it help if I were to chime in with a response about the benefits of kebab case over train case?
- btown 2y 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.

gnabgib 2y ago

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

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woodruffw 2y 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 2y 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.
- woodruffw 2y 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!

lupusreal 2y ago

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

gambiting 2y ago
What's a cheese steak? Just a steak but with melted cheese on top? Doesn't that ruin the steak?
- bdangubic 2y ago
  it would if it was actually a steak. for the type of meat you get on cheeesteaks - trust me - you want the cheese :)
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Technically they're not allowed to call it cheese. ;)
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      lol
- awad 2y 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 2y ago

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

billfor 2y ago
Well you would be fine in Japan.

mxfh 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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
macrael 2y ago
OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
- mxfh 2y 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.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    I'm never going to look at ratings. The only use there is photos of menus, food, and the restaurant itself.

btilly 2y 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.

macrael 2y ago
OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
- FloorEgg 2y 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.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    And probably understandable. Empirically, I don't really expect to find the best restaurants right around railway stations.
  - LorenPechtel 2y ago
    Yeah. The overall correlation was tiny but just looking at it you could see a pattern that's getting lost in the analysis.
robocat 2y ago
Where does crappy restaurant fit into your taxonomy?
- nh23423fefe 2y 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

glitchc 2y ago

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

wftglf 2y 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 2y 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.

macrael 2y ago
OP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
- function_seven 2y ago
  You're doing important work throughout this thread. Thanks.

ggambetta 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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).

Kozmik1 2y 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-d1109767-Reviews-Le_Train_Bleu-Paris_Ile_de_France.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g187147-d11097...

ghaff 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  And Canada is a place with American cuisine, French government and British technology.
Kozmik1 2y ago
My favorite German food is Turkish. My favorite British food is Lebanese.
gambiting 2y 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 2y 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.

nly 2y 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.

ReptileMan 2y ago
Worst kebab in London is highly competitive race with no need for handicaps.

wftglf 2y ago

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

vzaliva 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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...
  - vzaliva 2y ago
    I read the article and fact-checked the summary before posting. The original article is quite long, so the summary may be useful for those who are intrigued by the title and just want to know the outcome. I don’t see any need to mention the "humor" aspect here. Many seemingly laughable hypotheses have turned out to be true when rigorously tested. The author did a good job investigating this one.

brachistochron 2y 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.

JmsPae 2y 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 2y ago
Try fitting something non-linear or simply plot a mean (or median) rating over distance with some smoothing.
wjholden 2y ago
Which R-Tree Rust library were you referring to?
- JmsPae 2y ago
  https://github.com/georust/rstar 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.
lqet 2y 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.

paulorlando 2y 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 2y ago
And the kebab circle of life is complete. People are ruthless when it comes to food prices/quality.
- paulorlando 2y 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

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joshdavham 2y ago

Awesome post! Also, I dig your writing style

I_dream_of_Geni 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.

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kewho 2y 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 2y ago

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

ralferoo 2y 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 2y 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.

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pizlonator 2y ago

This made my day, it was science at its finest

stevage 2y 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?

JumpCrisscross 2y 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.'
- stevage 2y ago
  True. Everyone has the one thing they care about. I care about ambience. I barely notice the food.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > I care about ambience. I barely notice the food. I'm saying it's difficult if not impossible to disentangle these elements. The vibe, perhaps even the staffs' moods, will be in part a function of the diners. That, in turn, turns at least in part on the food. And vice versa--a place with a devout following that respects the kitchen staff will probably produce better food and ambiance, as both arise out of a sense of mutual respect. You may not care about the food directly. But if your barmate in a fun outfit with a contagious laugh does, that's part of the vibe you're there to feed on. (I love food. But I've sometimes found myself winnowing down a list of restaurant options by the lighting.)

coryaf 2y ago

For the Americans - by kebab it means gyro

gaiagraphia 2y ago
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whywhywhywhy 2y ago
Kebab and Gyro are pretty different in terms of bread, salad, sauce and even meat.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  Also, Americans all know what kebab is, but not the case with gyro

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Gabriel54 2y 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 2y ago

this thread is making me very hungry

hot_gril 2y ago

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

jaydeegee 2y ago

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

Horffupolde 2y ago

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

throwawayk7h 2y ago

Try correcting for density first.

bigbacaloa 2y ago

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protocolture 2y 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.

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lukaslalinsky 2y 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 2y ago

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

lqet 2y 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 2y 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)

jillesvangurp 2y 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).

skrebbel 2y 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 2y ago
  They pretend like people _do_ eat there, that's how the dirty cash ends up in the register.
- tinco 2y 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.

JR1427 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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
skrebbel 2y ago
It's not true though!

Justta 2y 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 2y ago

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

einpoklum 2y ago

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

InDubioProRubio 2y 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.

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hinkley 2y 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 2y ago

more please

evanb 2y 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.

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powerofmAnNnyYy 2y ago

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philjw 2y 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!

sdushane 2y ago

https://maps.app.goo.gl/7imPTP88PrYLpABb9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/7imPTP88PrYLpABb9 Best kebob in Stain-Denis, maybe all of Paris. Not close to train.

sdushane 2y ago

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

account42 2y 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 2y 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 https://www.youtube.com/@CanF.Kennedy

machine_ghost 2y 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 2y ago

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

Alifatisk 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 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 2y 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)