Restaurant quality: the case of Central Slovenian region

The purpose – This study has two key goals. The first part presents and compares different expert systems for assessing quality in the restaurants alongside the Ljubljana Quality Selection assessment methodology - LQS. In the second part, this study presents the results of a restaurant assessment in the Central Slovenian region using the LQS methodology. Design/methodology – In the first part of the study, we compare restaurant assessment systems through different criteria. In the second part, the research focuses on a restaurant assessment system in the Central Slovenian region. Anonymous experts collected data based on the LQS methodology. The main research questions are on how experts assess restaurants, and whether there are statistically significant differences in the quality of offers between urban and rural restaurants in the Central Slovenian region, as assessed by the LQS methodology. Findings – The results of the comparison show that in the expert restaurant assessment systems, restaurants are assessed anonymously, at least twice a year, with results published in printed form and online, the most respectable do not disclose their criteria of assessment and mainly select the best restaurants to be assessed. The second part is a quantitative study. The survey covered 64 urban and 26 rural restaurants. The results indicated no statistically significant differences in the quality offers between urban and rural restaurants. No significant differences were found between the four key groups of quality elements (food quality, service quality, ambience quality and value for money), nor the of overall restaurant quality. This study has shown, that according to an independent evaluation process, restaurant quality in the Central Slovenian region is high and there are no differences in the quality of offers between restaurants operating in rural and urban settings. There results also showed that food is the key element for restaurant to be assessed high. Originality of the research – This is the first study to investigate differences between expert restaurant assessment systems. The key contribution of this research lies in the fact that an independent new methodology for assessing restaurant quality was developed and implemented for the purpose of regional restaurant quality assessment.