On the clientele – Annie Armstrong in NYT:

‘Once a stopover for starving artists and gin-blossomed locals, Fanelli Cafe in Manhattan has become the choice meeting place for micro-celebrities brandishing hot dogs and Miista-heeled shoppers craving mid-spree martinis. In its 178 years on the corner of Mercer Street and Prince Street, the SoHo standby has never been hotter. The diners there, however, are more like a 4.1 out of 10.
At least, according to a GeoCities-esque website called LooksMapping.
LooksMapping is a digital heat map that claims to show “which restaurants have the most attractive diners — according to AI.”’

(…)

‘LooksMapping was created by Riley Walz, a 22-year-old programmer in San Francisco with a penchant for using Google review data to make sardonic observations about the restaurant industry. Mr. Walz was also one of three people behind Mehran’s Steak House, a fake restaurant with a near-perfect Google rating that opened for one night in 2023.
To create LooksMapping, Mr. Walz left his laptop open over a weekend as an A.I. model scraped 2.8 million Google reviews. From 1.5 million unique accounts, it identified 587,000 profile images with distinguishable faces. Mr. Walz then prompted the model to extrapolate whether those pictured were young or old, male or female, and, to put it in vintage internet terms, hot or not.’

(…)

‘Proximity makes little difference: Kiki’s, the perpetually overflowing Greek restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown, scored an 8.2, but its neighbor Bacaro, a slightly more upscale Italian restaurant that attracts virtually the same clientele, scored a 3.7.’

(…)

‘Back at Fanelli Cafe, a recent trip to more accurately gauge the 4-rated crowd found no off-duty models. But good manners (and good sense) would stop most onlookers short of calling anyone ugly.
“Actually, that score makes sense to me,” said Jasmine Baker, 24, a server there. “Eighty percent of our clientele are tourists, so they may not be ‘New York hot.’”’

Read the article here.

My favorite restaurants were either not listed or got lousy ratings, but alas.

I always thought that the service was more important than the food, but clientele trumps service.

It’s the clientele stupid.