Food Network Host Battle
Earlier this year, NBC launched Feast, a site which takes restaurant reviews from all over the web and distills them into a single 0-to-100 score for each venue. I wondered: could you apply a similar algorithmic approach to rating individual chefs?
The most obvious source of numeric ratings for individual chefs is online recipe reviews. I collected a list of Food Network hosts from foodnetwork.com. For each of these hosts, I gathered all of his or her recipes published on the site, as well as the average user rating for each recipe. This data was used to generate the table below.
How to Read the Table
Hosts are listed from highest weighted average recipe rating to lowest. The vertical spacing between two rows is proportional to the difference in average recipe ratings. The hosts who had fewer than 10 recipes available — Ted Allen, Jeff Corwin, and Duff Goldman — are hidden by default. Both of these settings can be changed using the checkboxes below. You can also hover over any bar to read its specific numeric value.
| Host | Rating |
Recipe Ratings Breakdown
|
Recipes | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ted Allen | 5.000 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 1 | ||
| Brian Boitano | 4.997 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.05 | 0.95 | 21 | ||
| Melissa d'Arabian | 4.842 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.02 | 0.36 | 0.62 | 45 | ||
| Daisy Martinez | 4.819 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.19 | 0.81 | 37 | ||
| Aaron McCargo, Jr. | 4.781 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.02 | 0.21 | 0.76 | 157 | ||
| Ina Garten | 4.755 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.02 | 0.29 | 0.69 | 655 | ||
| Alton Brown | 4.686 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.04 | 0.35 | 0.62 | 597 | ||
| Emeril Lagasse | 4.684 | 0.01 | 0.01 | 0.06 | 0.29 | 0.63 | 4,221 | ||
| Giada De Laurentiis | 4.676 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.03 | 0.39 | 0.58 | 892 | ||
| Anne Burrell | 4.662 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.02 | 0.27 | 0.72 | 116 | ||
| Dave Lieberman | 4.652 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.05 | 0.33 | 0.60 | 221 | ||
| Duff Goldman | 4.647 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.40 | 0.60 | 5 | ||
| Tyler Florence | 4.643 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.06 | 0.37 | 0.56 | 966 | ||
| Ellie Krieger | 4.594 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.03 | 0.40 | 0.56 | 305 | ||
| Bobby Flay | 4.583 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.05 | 0.33 | 0.60 | 1,037 | ||
| Sunny Anderson | 4.582 | 0.01 | 0.00 | 0.07 | 0.33 | 0.59 | 179 | ||
| Nigella Lawson | 4.556 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.48 | 0.52 | 71 | ||
| Guy Fieri | 4.542 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.05 | 0.37 | 0.57 | 292 | ||
| Jamie Oliver | 4.512 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.07 | 0.35 | 0.58 | 113 | ||
| Michael Symon | 4.492 | 0.01 | 0.00 | 0.09 | 0.38 | 0.51 | 68 | ||
| Rachael Ray | 4.490 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.07 | 0.46 | 0.46 | 1,597 | ||
| Patrick and Gina Neely | 4.477 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.09 | 0.27 | 0.64 | 11 | ||
| Michael Chiarello | 4.470 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.08 | 0.41 | 0.50 | 522 | ||
| Danny Boome | 4.453 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.14 | 0.35 | 0.50 | 84 | ||
| Food Network Kitchens | 4.448 | 0.01 | 0.01 | 0.10 | 0.40 | 0.48 | 1,314 | ||
| Paula Deen | 4.366 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.06 | 0.45 | 0.48 | 141 | ||
| Aida Mollenkamp | 4.359 | 0.00 | 0.02 | 0.07 | 0.33 | 0.59 | 133 | ||
| George Duran | 4.356 | 0.01 | 0.01 | 0.11 | 0.31 | 0.55 | 83 | ||
| Cat Cora | 4.352 | 0.02 | 0.00 | 0.12 | 0.42 | 0.44 | 84 | ||
| Mario Batali | 4.347 | 0.03 | 0.02 | 0.10 | 0.30 | 0.55 | 761 | ||
| Jeff Corwin | 4.333 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.33 | 0.00 | 0.67 | 3 | ||
| Robert Irvine | 4.319 | 0.04 | 0.05 | 0.08 | 0.28 | 0.55 | 309 | ||
| Claire Robinson | 4.307 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.06 | 0.46 | 0.48 | 101 | ||
| EatingWell | 4.297 | 0.03 | 0.04 | 0.11 | 0.32 | 0.49 | 426 | ||
| Alexandra Guarnaschelli | 4.225 | 0.01 | 0.03 | 0.07 | 0.40 | 0.49 | 68 | ||
| Warren Brown | 4.080 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.18 | 0.27 | 0.55 | 11 | ||
| Ingrid Hoffmann | 4.059 | 0.01 | 0.06 | 0.21 | 0.31 | 0.41 | 136 | ||
| Robin Miller | 3.982 | 0.00 | 0.03 | 0.16 | 0.55 | 0.26 | 397 | ||
| Sandra Lee | 3.573 | 0.01 | 0.08 | 0.35 | 0.43 | 0.13 | 1,075 | ||
Commentary
To be honest, I didn't even know Brian Boitano had a show on Food Network, but What Would Brian Boitano Make? seems to be very popular among viewers. And poor Sandra Lee can't seem to catch a break. Her boyfriend's mother very vocally dissed her lasagna recipe, and she ended up dead last among Food Network talent. Perhaps that's because her recipes draw comments like these from reviewers:
On Sandra's Halibut Tacos with Fish Salsa
"I must admit I would never have thought of serving fish with allspice and taco seasoning and salsa and cole slaw and peaches. But there's a good reason for that: this is disgusting."— Anonymous
On Sandra's Oriental Pork Wrappers
These look like entrails from a gutted and drained goat. Great for forecasting coming events — bad for dinner."— Anonymous
See Food Network Humor for more review gems.
A Note on the Visualization
To my knowledge, this type of “stacked-and-spaced bar chart” is a novel type of visualization. There were three types of information I most wanted to convey through its design:
- The absolute rank of each member of the group, from highest to lowest — This is illustrated from the simple top-to-bottom ordering/numbering scheme
- The distribution of average ratings, i.e. any clustering of scores and the size of gaps between the scores of different people — With the "space rows vertically by average rating" option selected, gaps and clustering are highlighted
- The distribution of each person's ratings across the 1-to-5 star scale — Each row of the bar chart is segmented into five sections corresponding to rating scale, and each bar is colored to make comparison of individual star segments easier between people
Methodology
The list of chefs and their respective recipes was collected from foodnetwork.com on February 20, 2010.
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