Making a meal of it

Iin New York t’s hard to imagine anyone could make the name Zagat obsolete in the world of restaurant news. Yet Google almost pulled it off in just under seven years.

On March 5, nine-yearold restaurant guide The Infatuation announced it was buying the Zagat brand for an undisclosed amount. The company — best known for its #eeeeeats hashtag — now controls the 35-year-old Zagat name and its international catalogue of reviews.

For some, the question isn’t why sold off Zagat; it’s what took so long. The relationship between the two companies had been troubled for years. The 2011 purchase was championed by former Google executive Marissa Mayer, who saw Zagat as an asset for the maps division she controlled.

But by 2013, some reviewers panned the release of the Zagat app, which had a difficult user interface and seemed designed to push content like “Rose for Every Mood: What to Bring to Any Summer Occasion” rather than help people find a good place to eat.

Then a few years ago, Google chose to infuse its mapping services with features such as user-generated restaurant reviews rather than leveraging Zagat and its resources. It was a defensive move to ward off rivals such as Yelp and Apple, which were, at the time, credible threats to Google’s dominance in local information. Zagat, meanwhile, was left to wither.

How did this happen? When Mayer departed in 2012, Zagat was left without an internal champion at Google, according to a former Zagat contractor who requested anonymity. Instead of hiring more full-time staff, Google relied on contractors for content and assigned a minimal number of engineers for major projects like focus on boilerplate guide lists, such as “Best Brunch” and “Best After Work Drinks.” The changes left the remaining staff frustrated, according to the former contractor.

Tim and Nina Zagat founded their eponymous guide as a hobby in 1979. The couple, having met at Yale Law School, started the business after a guest criticized a newspaper’s restaurant reviews at a dinner party. The Zagats began asking friends’ opinions and found 200 amateur critics to rate 100 restaurants Instead, they were told on Friday night that security was being updated and they would be locked out of Zagat tools, the contractor said. By Monday morning, they got the press release.

The Infatuation didn’t respond to a request for comment. In a statement, the site said it will operate Zagat as a separate brand, with a new, tech-driven platform that will be an alternative to other crowdsourced restaurant reviews.

In October, Google held its second Local Guides Summit in San Francisco. The program encourages users of the company’s Maps app to upload photos and write reviews of places such as restaurants, and submit new locations. During the summit, Google announced that 50 million people were contributing to the program, a 1,000-per-cent increase from the 5 million it tracked in early 2016. More than 700,000 venues are being added to Maps each month, according to the company. Maps has more than 1 billion users, making it a lot more efficient and broader than Zagat’s restaurant-review system.

“I assume Google figured out that they didn’t need the brand name in order to surface the information,” said restaurateur Nick Kokonas, whose Alinea dining room topped the list in the 2012 Chicago Zagat guide. “At the end of the day, Google can get all that Zagat information without actually owning Zagat, right?”

Aurora, with a market value of $5.75 billion, is doing due diligence on the U.S. market before it pursues a potential listing since marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, Booth said.

The move toward U.S. listings is another step in legitimizing Canada’s burgeoning marijuana industry and is positive for all companies, John Fowler, chief executive of Supreme Cannabis Co., said. “We’re going to see new eyeballs on the industry,” Fowler said.