I didn’t come up with this, but I wish I did. All credit to Noah Hayes for this. Unless he took it from someone else. Then all credit to that person.
It’s a 5 point scale, and 5 is the best.
Scale
5: You would recommend it to a friend.
4: You would go out of your way to eat there again.
3: You would eat there again.
2: You want your money back.
1: You want your time back
Why Use This Scale?
The nice thing about this scale is that it never really leaves any doubt as to what a restaurant should be ranked.
Rather than worrying about numeric scores, it directly targets the point of restaurant rankings: to figure out where to eat.
And if you’re the special snowflake that always finds 5 star places: just be happy at your good fortune. In any case, your tastes are likely to shift, so a lot of those five-star places will go down in ranking as you run down the hedonistic treadmill like a yuppie hamster, becoming snobbier with every lap. Life’s cruel that way.