A D.C. Restaurant Tour With the Zagats (No Pressure or Anything)

The Zagats are tired. It's a late July after noon, and they've been up since before 5 a.m. Nina looks great in black pants, a Dijon-colored jacket and gold earrings. Navy-blazered Tim, just up from a nap, is mumbling in his low, gentle growl about Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) being his campaign manager half a lif etime ago, back when Tim thought he'd leave law for politics. Instead, he decided to leave law for surveying "just about everything people enjoy."

"It's easier to create consumer democracy than the regular kind," he says over a club soda.

The couple came up with the idea for a restaurant ratings business in the '60s, after getting loosey-goosey on wine in Paris and swapping recommendations with friends. Since then, they've expanded Zagat Survey's ratings to movies, hotels and beyond, refined http://www.zagat.com and have been the subject of numerous parodies ("The Daily Show" used the Zagat template to mock-praise Guantanamo Bay in a prison survey; in wig and dress on "Saturday Night Live," Chris Farley read Zagat's reader-generated blurbs with obsequious enthusiasm).

Now it's almost year 30 of their enterprise, and they're in the District doing press for their 2009 guide to D.C. restaurants, which have been visited by 7,200 local registered reviewers, 3,000 of whom are dining out tonight, estimates Tim. The Zagats are about to join them. As they do in almost every city they visit, they're going on a tour of several places that have caught their eye, based on the 2009 survey.

An army of reviewers rated restaurants on a scale of 1 to 30 based on food, decor and service. The results: The top-rated new restaurant is Wolfgang Puck's the Source, and No. 1 overall for food, with a 29 rating, is the Japanese restaurant Makoto (4822 Macarthur Blvd. NW, 202-298-6866). Also interesting: the average cost of a D.C. meal is $35.13, and Washingtonians tip an average of 19.2 percent.

"Thank you for that terrific write-up," the hotel manager says as the Zagats depart for the tour in a town car.

"It's not us," Tim says. "It's our people, our reviewers. We don't take credit for bad write-ups . . ."

". . . just like we don't take credit for the good ones," finishes Nina. (They've been married 43 years.)

They don't plan to eat at the restaurants. Just walk in, take a peek at the menu, absorb the ambiance, perhaps greet a chef or owner if they're recognized. You don't even really need to taste the food to know what you're in for, Tim says.

"You can tell almost everything about a restaurant wi thin the first five minutes," he says, leading us into our first stop for the evening:

7:40 p.m., CityZen (1330 Maryland Ave. SW, 202-787-6006)

The Zagats walk into the quiet, ultra-modern-looking restaurant.

Host: Good evening. Are you joining us for dinner?