Show HN: I'm eating at all the phở restaurants in Portland, at least twice

Google reviews piss me off because it's either 1 star or 5 stars and who knows if the person actually ate the food. I wish people had to visit a place multiple times, spaced out, before their ratings would even count. I decided to take that philosophy and apply it to one dish, Phở.

I'm going to all the restaurants that serve phở in Portland, Oregon's city limits and rating them. You can see the ranking, but not the point values until I've visited twice. Technically you can go get the data as it's open source and get the scores, but most people are too lazy to do that. It's a simple static site built with astro, so hammer away at what I did wrong.

I've been going in spurts over the past couple years and I'm hoping to get through the first round within the next month or two. I'm a white guy that doesn't know anything so of course the ratings are completely subjective.

pho.curtisbarnard.com

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4 points

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oregoncurtis

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2 months ago

12 comments

vunderba ・ 2 months ago

> I wish people had to visit a place multiple times, spaced out, before their ratings would even count.

That would effectively remove all negative reviews. Eating out is expensive enough as it is, I'm not going to pay for mediocre food a second or third time around.

A better approach (for almost anything) is just to focus on reading 2-4 star reviews since they're usually the most measured.

  • oregoncurtis ・ 2 months ago

    That's what I typically will do, or search key phrases that I care about. I agree that there would be a lot less reviews, but I'd personally prefer quality over quantity.

diceduckmonk ・ 2 months ago

Funny enough, I’m a Vietnamese person from Portland and was doing this exact same analysis in Paris (highest density of overseas Vietnamese population) visiting a dozen places last month.

People visiting for a few days go with a “10 restaurants you have to try in Portland” which are just mediocre chic restaurants you can find in every other city. They don’t realized how underrated Asian food in Portland is. One, Google Maps and Yelp reviews are negative signals of for Asian food. Restaurants that highly rated above 4.5 are so for the “ambience” rather than the food. Two, the restaurants are dispersed rather than being concentrated around a Chinatown or Little Saigon.

ThrowawayR2 ・ 2 months ago

While I am quite envious, not to mention suddenly hungry for pho, I don't think restaurant reviews qualify for a Show HN. There are guidelines for Show HN submissions at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

  • diceduckmonk ・ 2 months ago

    I think it’s intellectually stimulating that people are taking a systemic and scientific approach for a niche kind of restaurant

  • oregoncurtis ・ 2 months ago

    Thanks, I did not read those guidelines and it seems you are right!

sebg ・ 2 months ago

Have you done a Phở-off?

I've done a similar thing with Pizza places around me and discovered that my tastes were different when I ordered the same type of pizza pie and had them all at the same time, compared to what I preferred in the restaurant.

Might be worth a try

  • oregoncurtis ・ 2 months ago

    That's pretty hard/impossible to do with Phở as the noodles will degrade pretty quickly. I'm hoping that go 3 times to a place spread over time will help average out the swings in my tastes.

    • sebg ・ 2 months ago

      Ah okay! Makes sense. I’ve never ordered them as I wasn’t sure how a soup gets delivered so it makes sense.

      Maybe one day you can write a book like Ivan Orkin did with Ramen :)

lakotasapa ・ 2 months ago

Don't see Pholandia or anything more west? You got me salivating but I'm in SW and east is quite a trek for just pho but dang...bc of your reviews. I'm taking me familia and doing some Particularly your #1!! Thx!

PS. "DM" me if you're interested in further talk. lakota gmail

  • oregoncurtis ・ 2 months ago

    Yeah I'm constraining myself to just locations within Portland city limits. If you take a look at the map there should be a layer which you can enable which shows the city boundaries. If I included the metropolitan area there would probably be well over 100 locations, that's probably too many to visit multiple times!