Posts Tagged ‘leeds’

Earlier this month I launched the 5th edition of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. Now, with five editions behind us and several years of data, I decided it would be interesting to see what we could mine from that information.

Number of restaurants

You might expect the number of restaurants in Leeds to be going up. It is, but only slightly.

This graph shows the total number of restaurants. Over the past two and a half years the number of restaurants has increased 10%. These are not the same restaurants though. It is a case of them opening faster than they are closing.

This graph shows the number of new restaurants opening and old restaurants closing between each edition. Restaurants have consistently opened while closures have been more sporadic. It is worth noting though that the release of each edition of the guide has not been equally spaced, even though it is shown this way on the graph, so that distorts the picture somewhat.

How we rate

Most restaurants are likely to be middle-of-the-road, with some not so good restaurants, some very good restaurants, and a few poor and excellent restaurants at either ends. So what happens when you plot frequency against rating?

Ah, just what we wanted: a beautiful bell curve! Two is a little low for a perfect curve, but normal distributions are often imperfect in the real world. This suggests to me that our ratings are consistent with what you would expect from restaurants running in the free market.

That only shows data from restaurants that are still open. What about restaurants that have closed?

What we would expect to see here is a little less clear. Perhaps that 1-rating is the highest as poor restaurants should close the most. But given there are some many 3-rating restaurants, this might not be the case, and you may have to adjust it for frequency to see such a result. As it is we have another bell curve.

There is a clear asymmetry in the graph though. Far more 1-rating restaurants close than 5-rating restaurants, and far more 2-rating restaurants close than 4-rating restaurants, indicating that our ratings are broadly consistent with where the market chooses to spend, or not spend, it’s money.

What type of food is the best?

What cuisine produces the highest standards? Can you provide any correlation between the type of food and how good a restaurant is?

This graph shows each cuisine type and the average rating it receives. No category can maintain an average rating lower than 2 or higher than 4 because no range of restaurants can be that consistent.

I was not surprised to see Thai so high up. Steakhouses are also typically on the higher price range, so score well (though we do factor in price to an extent when awarding ratings). Chinese scoring to high is mostly a result of the less nice Chinese restaurants closing down.

The number in brackets after each cuisine indicates the number of restaurants in that category. So the ratings for Persian, German and seafood are pretty meaningless because it is based on a single restaurant.

What useful information we can draw from this is less clear. Just because the average restaurant scores well or poorly does not mean that all restaurants will. There are bad Thai restaurants for example (actually, there aren’t, but there used to be one) and good Indians (lots of them!). However, if you were to avoid eating at new hotels, casinos, fast food and pubs based on it being unlikely to be a good meal, few people would fault you for that.

For this year’s Humanist winter social, we had a meal at the Lawnswood Arms.

The OED is considered the closest thing to the definitive record of the English language that there is. They claim to be the definitive record. However, without a British equivalent of the Académie française (whose judgements are not even binding), it is difficult to argue a definitive document.

Nevertheless, it is the best thing we have. I had never taken a look at it before, but the depth of information is astonishing. For each word, sometimes over multiple entries, it contains the spellings, forms, frequency in current usage, etymology and a long list of definitions with extensive citations for each. The definitions are followed by a list of phrases, compounds, and derivatives. There is a thesaurus entry for each definition.

In short, it is difficult to image a more complete reference on the English language.

Why do I mention this? Because it turns out that it is totally free!

I have used Dictionary.com for many years because it is easy and for a free product, it is very good. It too contains pronunciation, synonyms, and a limited amount of auxiliary information. It was perfectly adequate for what I wanted. The idea of paying the £215.00 a year subscription to get access to the OED was clearly laughable.

However, it turns out that we all have the ability to access it for free. The OED website allows you to log in using your public library membership number. They say almost every library subscribes, but given my Leeds Library card worked, it is hard to imagine any council cheaper than Leeds.

I registered my library card about eight years ago and it was still valid. It is well worth digging out of the wardrobe. Or, if you do not have one, pop down to your local library and register for one. Once you do, you can access the service online at home, or from anywhere else.

For the December lecture at West Yorkshire Humanists two local Greenpeace volunteers came down to tell us about their organisation. This took the form of an interactive workshop: we were answering true or false questions, putting photos into a timeline and discussing the ethical issues surrounding the environment and protesting.

They started with a video. I think if anything that did dispel a myth as I assumed they were quite a well rounded organisation that did thinks like education and lobbying. The video just seemed to suggest they spent all their time making trouble. I’m not saying that annoying Shell is a bad thing. I suspect it is a probably a good thing. However, I did not seem as multi-faceted as I had expected. The rest of the session was more engaging though.

Alan and Joe were lovely people and delivered a very honest and open presentation. It was a pleasure to have them at the group.

I am working with Sky Sports at the moment, who recently relocated their office to Leeds Dock. They are encouraging everyone to talk about how good it is, so here is my contribution.

It was a smooth transition and everything is up and running. It was only a few months between signing the lease and moving in, so there is still plenty to do. It will be great when we get the other buildings up-and-running to give us additional meeting space.

It is a nice location and you get a good view of the dock.

That floor is as slippy as it looks. You can pick up a huge amount of speed on the new chairs: great for chair racing. You can also see that there is no roof. This is the same across the entire building. Everything has been left exposed, which is a design feature. There are screens everywhere, so you feel like you are in the future.

Noise levels were quite high initially but it seems to be calming down now. There is also a cafe that Sky subsidise. So for example, I can of pop that would be £2.50 on the high street is £1.00 in the cafe.

Whether it quite puts us up there with Google and Facebook as one of the best campuses in the world, I suspect probably not. But it is a cool place to work. And ultimately it is the people that make Sky a great place to be.

One of the few benefits of my recently drastically extended commute to work is getting to enjoy the morning sky.

Still looking for that perfect gift for someone? I’ve come to your rescue, as yesterday saw the launch of the 5th edition of the Leeds Restaurant Guide! It should now be available on Kindle Store. This edition has 20 new restaurants and 4 updated reviews.

Added

• 2 Oxford Place
• Archie’s
• Bilbao
• Bill’s
• Brotherhood of Pursuits & Pastimes
• Five Guys
• Gusto
• La Rambla
• Manahatta
• My Thai
• Pie Minister
• Pintura
• Revolucion de Cuba
• Smoke Barbecue
• Soba
• Stockdales
• The Headrow
• The Liquorist
• The Phoenix
• Zaap Thai

Updated

• Akbar’s
• Elysium
• Stonegate Pubs
• Thai A Roy Dee

Thank you to those who celebrated our Leeds wedding with us! The photos are back and here are a few of our favourites.

Last month I presented a talk at Atheist Society entitled “Humanism and the Science of Morality”. It looked at why we have morals, how it works in an evolutionary framework, and what that knowledge tells us when constructing a moral framework in Humanism.

Most of all though, I am pleased to see A-Soc still going. A few of us thought it might have been the final year last year, but their start-of-term pub quiz showed otherwise. At my talk too there were fresh young faces, and hopefully the society will enjoy many more years.

Earlier this month I ran the Abbey Dash for the second time. It was their 30th birthday, making them even older than me. The photo above is me the next day. I did not look like that after the race. I looked more like an shrivelled old man about to have a heart attack.

The weather conditions were not ideal. It rained before the race, leaving us stood around for an hour in the cold and wet. Once the race started (at which point you actually want the rain to cool you down a bit) it backed off.

I was 22 second slower than last year, coming home in 1:07:58. Not brilliant, but I trained harder last year, so to get such a small difference entires de-values all the work I did for the 2014 Dash. It certainly wasn’t the nightmare that my friend Howell had, running a 32:10, over 6% slower than his target time. I’ll give him some tips for next year.

I made the mistake of putting 70 minutes as my expected time which bumped me down to the slowest starting pen. Next year I think I will bump it up as I have never run a 70+.

I am not sure they are quite as well organised as Run For All. There is only one water station and I had to skip that because there was a queue. There was no big banner for the finish line so I did not know when it was time for that very final push until it was almost upon me. I was unable to spot some of the kilometre distance markers either. Finally I did not get my time until more than 24 hours after, whereas Run For All text me in under a minute of finishing (which I was very impressed at, later in the day would have been fine).