University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

• Print

• Comments (1)

• 

  “I’m just trying to perform a service. …I’m not a real restaurant reviewer and I don’t consider this to be a kind of food blog.”

  William Rapaport

  Associate Professor Emeritus of Computer Science

By JIM BISCO

Published: April 12, 2012

As arrangements coordinator for an international conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics held in Buffalo in May 1988, William Rapaport, assistant professor in UB’s Department of Computer Science at the time, put together a four-page handout of favorite area restaurants for attendees. No one could predict that the modest tip sheet would grow to become an influential dining-out exchange with a voracious following.

Bill Rapaport’s Interactive Buffalo Restaurant Guide celebrated its millionth hit in March. As it begins its 25th year, the guide continues to attract readers and contributors at a steadily rising pace.

Rapaport decided to update the original document yearly to hand out to friends and people across the university who also were involved in conferences. In 1993, a member of his department’s laboratory staff put it online. The rest is history.

“I started to update it on a more regular basis,” he says. “I would solicit reviews of restaurants from friends. Originally, it was just supposed to be good places to eat. Then people started sending me bad places to eat. I thought, okay, why not warn people of where to stay away from, in addition to where to go.”

The guide grew far beyond his circle of friends. He began to receive emails from people as far as Austria saying that they’re coming to Buffalo and will be looking for a good place to eat. Rapaport says that the website even garnered a notice in The Wall Street Journal. “At that point I said, okay, I guess this is providing a service. So I just kept it going.”

Actually, according to Rapaport, the site may well have reached the million mark quite a bit earlier since the counter was installed five years after the website was established. From that point, it appeared that the site averaged 1,400 hits per week, he says, adding that in more recent months the site has doubled that weekly average.

Rapaport enjoys food but doesn’t consider himself a so-called foodie because he says there are many dishes that he won’t touch with a 10-foot pole. “I’m more of an editor than anything else,” he contends. “I’m just trying to perform a service, saying to somebody, ‘Here are some good places to eat and here is what some people say about them.’ I’m not a real restaurant reviewer and I don’t consider this to be a kind of food blog.”

Other dining review sites like Yelp and Urban Spoon have come into prominence online since the Buffalo Restaurant Guide emerged, but Rapaport maintains that there is a difference. “Anybody can submit to them and it automatically goes on their website. Anybody can submit to me but I will edit it. I’ll fix the grammar and spelling. I have occasionally gotten reviews that are potentially libelous and I’ll say, ‘Sorry, I can’t publish that.’”

Another difference with his site, he says, is that he will allow for some communication between restaurant owners and the customers. For instance, after one Buffalo restaurant received a comment on the guide about a negative experience, the owner wanted to apologize personally to the patron and asked if Rapaport could supply the reviewer’s name. “I don’t want to give that kind of contact information out, but I published his reply so that people could get in touch on their own. On the other hand, another restaurant had gotten some negative reviews. They called me and demanded that I remove the negative reviews. Instead of doing that, I just published their comment word for word. Now they’re out of business.”

Rapaport notes that the guide originally began with reviews of restaurants near the North and South campuses. (The original handout, interesting for its number of area restaurants that have since vanished, is now posted on the site.) Now reviews cover restaurants throughout Erie County and parts of Niagara, Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties and Southern Ontario. “Now that the guide is no longer just for conference goers on campus, I’m working on a new location index that is not so much focused on what’s near the universities but by neighborhood and by area in various towns,” he says.

The New York City native is a tireless booster of this region. A link on the restaurant site is entitled Good Things About Buffalo and Western New York; it documents positive comments about the area from those who are not from here. Five years ago he and his wife preserved comedy icon Lucille Ball’s childhood home in the village of Celoron near Jamestown by purchasing and redecorating it in the period when she lived there.

After a 28-year career at UB, Rapaport retired from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in January. As associate professor emeritus, he maintains an office in the department and is currently developing a textbook from his course on the philosophy of computer science.

The restaurant guide, meanwhile, will continue. “I’m going to be in Buffalo for at least the next two years while my son is still in high school. After that, my wife and I are planning to move to our house on Chautauqua Lake, but that’s still in the area and I can access my computer down there as easily as I can anywhere else. So as long as the university and my department are willing to continue to host this, I don’t see any reason why I should give it up,” Rapaport reasons, adding with a laugh, “It’s my most widely read publication.”