Mad City Zip Crawl

About this project

Ninety-four restaurants across thirteen Madison zip codes, eaten one zip at a time, scored the same way every time, until there are none left.

How the scoring works

Every restaurant gets four scores out of ten:

• Food — the only one that really matters.
• Service — measured against what the place is trying to be. A taco counter isn’t failing for not having a sommelier.
• Atmosphere — the room, the noise, the light, whether you’d come back on purpose.
• Value — what you got against what you paid. A $9 lunch can beat a $70 dinner here.

The Overall score is not an average — it’s a judgment. If the food is a nine and everything else is a five, that’s still a good restaurant, and the number should say so.

Scores live in a spreadsheet, not in the prose. That’s on purpose: it means I can’t quietly inflate a number to match how fondly I remember the night.

Who pays

I pay for every meal. No comped dinners, no sponsored reviews, no free food in exchange for a write-up. Nobody knows I’m coming.

If that ever changes — a restaurant invites me, a brand wants to sponsor a post — it will be stated at the top of that post, in plain language, before you read a word of the review.

The only thing this project has going for it is that nothing here was bought. I’d rather it earn nothing than be worth nothing.

What counts as a restaurant

Any place in one of these zip codes where you can buy prepared food and eat it. Cafés count. The ice cream shop counts. The taco counter inside the coffee bar counts. Grocery store delis do not.

It’s an arbitrary line. Every line would be. This one is at least written down.

Corrections

Get something wrong and I’ll fix it and say I fixed it. If you own a restaurant here and I’ve got a fact wrong — the hours, the chef, the spelling — tell me. Facts get corrected. Opinions don’t.