About
Going out to eat is expensive. It just is. So when I plan a date, or a vacation, or even just lunch with friends, I don’t usually say, “Hey, let’s go to the place down the street that’s kind of ok.” I turn into a neurotic mess trying to find the best possible place I can. It’s an unhealthy way to live, but when my friends ask for recommendations, I usually always have an answer—even if the answer is somewhere I’ve never been. And that presents its own problems.
My goal with The Hall of Yum isn’t to create yet another review site with some untrained guy’s food opinions—it’s to aggregate the amazing food journalism out there to definitively rank the best restaurants out there. I’m starting with the top 100 restaurant/bars in Phoenix because that’s where I live, then heading to places I tend to travel to, because those are the places I already neurotically scout before going. Maybe I’ll hire someone along the way and spread the site across the globe… who knows!
Yumpoints
Aggregating food sites is tricky because most cities don’t have many strict food reviewers anymore. Instead, people are writing features, making lists, and giving out all sorts of awards. So to deal with this, I’ve created Yumpoints. When I find an article (or page, or whatever), I put it into one of three categories: national news is worth 2 Yumpoints, local news that covers the entire region counts for 1 Yumpoint, and niche topics/articles with a narrow focus count as .5 Yumpoints.
Putting it in context, a New York Times mention about a restaurant in Phoenix is 2 Yumpoints, a Phoenix New Times award counts as 1 Yumpoint, and an article about the best restaurants in Scottsdale counts as .5 Yumpoints, because Scottsdale is just a small part of Phoenix. And to make things as fair as possible, I do my very best to exclude sources that write paid content—some restaurants put a significant amount of their marketing budget into creating influencer content, but I’m looking for unbiased opinions here. I’m also, at least for now, excluding crowdsourced/forum reviews. I may take a Yelp article listing their top 100 restaurants for the year—a grand aggregate of crowdsourced reviews—but I don’t put much stock into individual reviewers on sites like these. For now, I’m just looking at content from people with actual websites.
Who Am I?
I guess I should introduce myself. I’m Chris Hall, a very hungry guy who lives in Gilbert, AZ—one of the many big suburbs of Phoenix. I was formerly a (very remote) Product Manager at a big domain registrar in Europe/New Zealand, and before that I was a copywriter at an ad agency here in town, and before that I was the editor of an iPhone gaming blog. Now I’m mostly just a dad with an appetite.
