Zagat, the extensive and highly regarded restaurant rating guide book, released the results of its 2012 New York City Restaurants Survey Wednesday.
This edition is the first New York guide since Zagat Survey was acquired by Google last month. Tim Zagat, who founded the company with his wife, Nina, said readers won’t notice the difference. “The survey was largely completed before the deal closed,” Mr. Zagat said.
The Zagats started their survey in New York 32 years ago and have since expanded to more than 100 cities, and started to included food trucks last year.
According to Tim Zagat “We used to call them roach-coaches in the old days. The few food trucks that existed were kind of sloppy. A lot of these are run by very, very good restaurateurs and the quality and the cleanliness of these food trucks is much, much better than anything that we’d ever known, even imagined, five years ago.”
The Top 5 NYC Food Trucks
5. Korilla Food Truck – The Korean Barbecue Truck launched by a young Columbia graduate and winner of the Vendy Award for Rookie of the Year.
4. Van Leeuwen Ice Cream Truck – Consistently ranked as one of the city’s best ice cream vendors.
3. Wafels & Dinges – the truck serving up authentic Belgian waffles.
2. Taim Mobile – A popular falafel and smoothie truck born of the West Village institution.
1. Nauti – City seafood sensation Luke’s Lobster recently rolled out Nauti and the lobster-roll serving truck took top honors.
Zagat said there were 135 notable brick and mortar restaurant openings and just 68 closings in the past year. These numbers help to show that the growth of the mobile food industry is not preventing restaurants from opening their doors and are not causing mass closings due to the claims of the industry holding an unfair competitive advantage of the brick and mortar establishments.