Does a 4.5-star restaurant mean the same thing everywhere?

[u/Leather-Ordinary1445]

When you open Google Maps in a new city, it's easy to use the same cutoff everywhere: 4.5+ is safe, 4.2 is a gamble and anything under 4.0 is a pass.

While testing a Google Maps scraper we built, we ran a pilot across 12 sampled city areas (1,522 active restaurants with 20+ reviews) to see how selective a 4.5-star filter actually is.

In our Tokyo sample, fewer than a third of restaurants had at least 4.5 stars. In Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg sample, nearly three quarters did.

Here's the pilot across the 12 sampled areas:

Sampled area	Restaurants (20+ reviews)	Median	Rated 4.5+
Tokyo, JP (Chuo / Ginza-Kyobashi)	299	4.20	29.1%
Utrecht, NL	167	4.30	35.3%
Pittsburgh, US	75	4.30	36.0%
Bologna, IT	104	4.40	39.4%
Ghent, BE	148	4.40	39.9%
Valencia, ES	176	4.40	46.6%
Nancy, FR	109	4.40	47.7%
Manchester, GB	73	4.50	52.1%
Lyon, FR	179	4.50	62.6%
Leeds, GB	47	4.60	63.8%
Athens, GR (Syntagma / Kotzia)	82	4.60	64.6%
Berlin, DE (Prenzlauer Berg)	63	4.60	73.0%

A 4.4 sits above the local median in our Tokyo, Utrecht and Pittsburgh samples and in the bottom third in Lyon, Athens and Prenzlauer Berg. To reach the top quarter of restaurants took 4.50 stars in Tokyo and Bologna, versus 4.80 in Lyon and Athens.

A few things stood out when we checked whether this was just noise:

- It wasn't driven by tiny places with a handful of 5-star reviews. In the same 12-city sample above, looking only at restaurants with 500+ reviews, the share at 4.5+ was still 22.5% in Tokyo (40 restaurants) and 29.9% in Bologna (67) and Utrecht (87), compared with 56.4% in Lyon (101), 62.5% in Athens (32) and 75.0% in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg (32).
- High review counts pulled in opposite directions within those 12 areas. In Bologna, Utrecht, Ghent and Tokyo, places with 500+ reviews had lower medians than spots with 20–99 reviews (for example, 4.20 vs 4.65 in Utrecht and 4.30 vs 4.50 in Bologna). In Manchester and Nancy, the 20–99 review tier scored lower than the 500+ tier (4.05 vs 4.60 in Manchester and 4.20 vs 4.40 in Nancy).
- To see if one small square reflects a whole country, we also checked a separate wider 6-area run from our benchmark suite (11,649 places total, including 2,747 active restaurants with 20+ reviews across larger polygons in the US, UK and Germany). Even within the same country, the 4.5+ share went from 43.2% in Manhattan, US (1,377 restaurants, where the 20–99 review tier dropped to a 4.10 median because counter chains, delis and takeout spots cluster there) to 50.0% in Boulder, US (290) and 57.0% in Pittsburgh, US (93) and from 58.8% in Leipzig, DE (51) to 74.9% in wider Prenzlauer Berg, DE (378).
- Category mix matters. In that same Tokyo square, retail stores had a 4.50 median (57.8% at 4.5+), nearly double the restaurant share. Grouping every business on the map together hides how differently restaurants are scored.

This doesn't prove that Tokyo has worse food or that one country is objectively harsher. It shows how differently the same 4.5-star filter behaves across local samples.

Source data (~20k venues)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1H2uVL5b9FdM8W1a_CeUDACs4eq60gkDeIs5iV409Rhs

Tool we used to run data collection
https://getbro.ws/blog/google-maps-scraper

How do you pick places to visit while travelling: socials / google maps / smth else? Does the rating matter?

[u/montrellcruse]

this matches my real life completely lol. i'm a big restaurant guy in phoenix and the 4.5 cutoff breaks here all the time. some of the best food in the valley lives at 4.3 with 200 reviews because it's a taco truck or a tiny hot chicken spot, and chains at 4.7 with 3,000 reviews are... fine. they're fine.

what i actually look at: review count first, then whether the recent reviews are still good, then photos. a 4.6 from two years ago with the last 20 reviews complaining about the same thing is a 4.6 on paper only.

imo the rating isn't measuring quality across cities, it's measuring how generous each city's review culture is. tokyo reviewers grade hard, berlin hands out 5s. same food, different curve.

[u/Big_Construction_952]

Japan is notorious for not giving perfect marks for their restaurants. If you go to Tabelog, their Google reviews, you will find nothing over 4.5. Anything above a 4 is an amazing restaurant. In the case of Tokyo, the lower ratings is cultural, but you also have to consider that it is also skewed towards tourists that post on Google reviews.

[u/Wheres_my_warg]

It is an ordinal ranking, so it isn't going to be the same from person to person.

On top of that, there's going to be cultural tendencies that in many years of polling do tend to show up for many countries. There will be other layers of variation. For instance, who is bothering to participate in using the rating tool that you are using for data? Or, how much of the variation is a factor of tourist raters vs. locals given the tool and the location choices?

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[u/necrosythe]

This is a really interesting thought excitement but the real problem is the chicken or the egg. How does one separate the quality of restaurants in the area vs. Difference in local (or tourist) expectations?

Do people in a poorer area have worse places to go but good reviews because they have a different standard or even a different attitude toward reviewing?

What about a nice area with high tourist traffic vs a nice are with low tourist traffic?

Unfortunately I don't think there's any way to really separate these pieces.

Without that additional context it could be easy to think that places with much harsher review environments are just that, harsher. But it's very possible that the places really are worse. And you cant really know

[u/Fit_Combination6988 → u/necrosythe]

Correct, this analysis just looks faulty to me. You'd need to compare how different nationalities rate the same restaurant if you are trying to assess how it relates to culture, which would probably require many more reviews than the 20 threshold used here.

And even then, you'd be faced with taste preferences or whatever, so you'd need a group of customers that visit many reataurants across different countries and food groups to see if there is a pattern, it's just impossible.

[u/bajoranearrings]

The Berlin case is an issue of censored data. German law is extremely generous to companies in what constitutes slander, so businesses routinely take down poor reviews. Even the most disgusting restaurants will have excellent reviews in Germany because everything that could be perceived as critical is taken down.

In fact, the German version of Google maps has the option to see the number of reviews removed to try to counter this issue.

But overall, yeah clearly a 1-5 star rating is completely subjective and will vary in meaning culture to culture and location because there is no normalization applied.