Created by New York lawyers Tim and Nina Zagat in 1979, the Zagat Restaurant Survey brought computer-powered statistical methods and an avowedly egalitarian ideology to restaurant criticism. The Zagats synthesized numerical ratings and narrative reviews from amateur food lovers into paragraph-length listings, eventually selling millions of slim burgundy guidebooks annually for cities around the Global North. The Survey allowed a classed cohort of power users to shape urban environments with their collective judgments, meeting a widespread desire for more extensive information on upscale consumption spaces as the rhythms of professional and social life were changing drastically for highly educated workers. The Zagat Survey was both a class strategy by an emerging professional cohort to assert their dominance over the cultural and built environment in New York City, and a prototypical location-based service (LBS), pioneering many of the features assumed to be inherent to Web 2.0 networked applications.
