Evaluating Chef's Creativity and Restaurant Quality: An Empirical Analysis of the Role of Gastronomic Guides in the Italian Fine-Dining Market

The quality of fine-dining restaurant food is complex and presents information issues in customers' quality evaluation, configuring this good as a luxury and cultural good. We investigate the role of experts in influencing customers' evaluation and other stakeholders' characteristics in such a sector by analyzing a dataset of top Italian chefs and restaurants from 2011 to 2019. To complement these data, we directly surveyed starred chefs to get their self-assessment. We use a structural equation model to measure cooking knowledge, culinary creativity, chefs' and restaurants' names, and experts' and customers' evaluations. We analyze the relationships between these constructs and variables like meal prices, seating capacity, tourist and resident numbers, and chef's age. Guides play a significant role in shaping customers' evaluations and influencing prices. Furthermore, fine dining experts focus more on evaluating the businesses themselves, the supply side, rather than the chefs' creation process, the “creative side”.