I guess you could call me and my wife foodies. We don't own a Viking range or know Charlie Trotter personally or anything like that, but we have always loved going out for great meals whenever we're on the road (great restaurants are harder to come by locally). We developed this affection for epicurian delights while living in Boston a decade ago, and our trusty road map was the Zagat Restaurant Guide.

The guide has its quirks. For one thing, they use a 30 point scale to rate the restaurants on food, service and decor. Every locale is graded on a curve (experience has shown me that a 27 in Orlando is not the same as a 27 in Manhattan), and suburban restaurants are the most likely to have inflated ratings (I guess the locals are happy to have a decent place nearby to eat).

Zagat has become quite a phenomenon since we picked up our first guidebook all those years ago: they've branched out to provide ratings for everything from movies to hotels and airlines, to New York City theater. Everywhere you go, from San Francisco to Philadelphia to London and Paris, restaurants are proud to display their maroon "Zagat Rated" signs in the front window (I've even seen Zagat listings touted by places which are not-so-well rated — I guess there's no such thing as bad publicity).

But with such widespread acceptance and visibility has come, I feel, a tempering of viewpoints, and hence, a decrease in the guide's usefulness. Specifically: I noticed recently that the online Zagat guide ratings no longer include their symbol for when reviews about a restaurant are strongly mixed. The paper and internet guides both used to show a filled-in square next to the restaurant name when customer reviews were generally uniform, and a half-filled square (it looked like two triangles, one filled, one empty), when views were split.

The reviews still offer some negative commentary on restaurants, but why they've eliminated this quickly-scanned symbol I'm not sure.

Is it because, with the explosion of Food TV, far more people started eating out at nice restaurants, now feel they're capable critics, and now every restaurant has its significant share of negative reviews? Arguably, this shouldn't be a concern: Zagat guides were founded on the idea that local residents could offer as good of guidance as any newspaper's resident food critic. Granted, the local residents who offered the ratings early on were Mr. & Mrs. Zagat and their friends — very well-traveled residents with well-refined palates. Perhaps with the boom in popularity of their guides (and, I assume, a large uptick in the number of submitted ratings) has come more explicit belief on the part of the Zagats that while all things are equal, some are not.

And what if a more depressing reason underlies the decision: that the widespread use of Zagat ratings by the restaurants as well as the public has led the company to try to protect restaurants by covering up more obvious signs of dischord in the dining public? The guide already culls quips from individual raters to make their reviews, and that part of the proverbial sausage making is kept behind the scenes. If they were shading things further to play nice with the industry they purport to be critiquing, it would undercut my trust in the value of the rating system.

I hope it's not the latter. But I'd like to hear more about why this helpful symbol is no longer available.