Why does my Unique Restaurant/Church Combination keep getting rejected?
SweetnessMcBoss-PGO
Posts: 19 ✭✭
I have a local unique BBQ restaurant that I have nominated three times. The owner is an ordained minister and he closes the store on Sunday and hosts church there, in the restaurant. It is not only a "gathering place for friends/strangers, where you can share a meal" but it is a place of worship too.
The first time I nominated it, I read through the criteria and saw that it said "places you take an out of town visitor." I talked with the wayfarer discussion group and they explained that businesses are hard to pass.
The second time I nominated it, I put links in showing that the owner is an ordained minister and that the address for his church of God service is the same as the restaurant. If you go to the links they mention the owner is ordained and the address for church of christ dayton street is exactly the same as the restaurant.
http://www.jabosbarbeq.com/About-Us.html
https://www.churchofchristdaytonst.com/
The third time I nominated and upgraded it was this week, after the criteria was changed to include popular unique restaurants.
I'm pretty frustrated now, I don't understand why a nomination that meets wayfarer criteria in two different ways was rejected. Especially now that popular restaurants was in the criteria.
Comments
It's being rejected because your nomination has not convinced the majority of your local reviwers that this is in any way "special" and that it should become a Waypoint. I have to say I agree with them, it just looks like a "generic restaurant" to me. Just because something is presumed to be "eligible" does not mean it must be accepted.
So, in general, what about a restaurant makes it more than a generic restaurant? Do you think there is anything that would convince you otherwise? What type of restaurants do you accept?
Your last nomination was probably the best one, I don’t think the church part is really going to help get this bbq place to be accepted. But if you can link something to when it won that award that would really help. Plus if you have a trip advisor and its top rated in your city that would help too to prove its a destination spot!
also i find with restaurants specifically if you upgrade you are more than likely going toget a rejection as people from other cities dont have any connection with it. So id re submit with more links for the awards they have won or news articles its been in and not upgrade may help
Ok, I thought the place of worship helped because it makes it more unique and less generic. I can take that out next time.
Do you think this helps my nomination?
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g33456-d5104336-Reviews-Jabo_s_Bar_Be_Q-Greenwood_Village_Colorado.html
That would probably help a bit I think,
Something that appears in a recognised guidebook or similar, like a restaurant with a Mitchlen star or somewhere famous like "The Ritz". There is one thread on here on a similar sort of topic where the restaurant is displaying several "Best in town.." award plaques from the local town and that keeps getting rejected. Tripadvisor reviews are not going to swing anything for me, to easy to fake and i never read them.
You need a ton of people in town to bring up a rating for trip advisor and its widely known as a cite that people would use to find local hotspots. Restaurants dont need a michelin star to be eligible as long as they are locally unique. I’m tryingto get a family mexican restaurant to pass where i live as its the only sit in family mexican restaurant in the whole city and its not a franchise either. Just takes a few tries for restaurants and small businesses usually i find
I agree, my fiance owns a chocolate shop here and it takes a lot of work to get a generally positive online presence.
Jabo's has a wall of mounted local awards and local press reviews. I think if I use that as my main image (like the other person on here who was asking about restaurant criteria) then I can put the trip advisor and talk about the local awards in the picture and hopefully reviewers will keep an open mind.
How many tries did it take for your mexican restaurant nomination?
I saw that thread talking about the restaurant with award plaques and I don't agree with rejecting their restaurant. I hope that isn't the standard Niantic I wants because I think it should have passed. To me, calling a restaurant like that generic is incorrect because it isn't. It's a popular restaurant that draws us together in a culturally relevant way, like the criteria says:
I’m still trying to get it to pass they are always hit or miss. First time i submitted when it was before the new criteria now im just waiting lol
Cities are very large and you will not always have to check wayspots in the exact area where you live, that is unlikely, in general, you will get wayspots throughout your city and areas surrounding yours, if you live in a specific area of your city And there is a restaurant that meets all the criteria and ends up rejecting it because they see it as something generic knowing that the generic has already been removed from the list, like the reviewers who do not even know the restaurant in that area of their city And you probably never have the need to know it or know the history you have, you can decide that it is something generic and reject it.
First photo was sorta okay, second was maybe too dark, first thing that sells me on a nomination is a photo that shows its unique or can identify what it is, the BBQ decal was great but the lighting made it hard. Listing it as a church might confuse people so listing it but your descriptions were great
I think a restaurant that doubles up as a church is something quite unique and worthy of mentioning. I think this is a good candidate but unfortunately you're fighting against a lot of reviewers biased against restaurant nominations...
If they have awards then I would use that as your supporting picture and explain in the description as well as the secondary info that they have won awards and list as many as you can.
I got a waypoint in my local bowling alley because of their unique floor design which won 3 different awards.
(I apologize if this comes across as too harsh. It's late, and I'm not editing for "gentleness" in the ways that I typically do.)
Restaurants are difficult, and take a lot of effort.
There is an emotional component to submissions as well as the technical aspects, and one of the things that can sink a "difficult" submission is a weak photo. My guess is that your photo is what's sinking this. Your first one is boring, and will probably appear in most games as mostly just a wall. The second one, the one with red light, is the best of the three. The name is centered, but it's going to be hard to read in postage-stamp size-- more contrast would be better. The third one is even worse than the first in terms of being uninspiring and looking terrible when it's shrunk down. Really, REALLY get a high-quality enticing picture, which I will admit is going to be hard given its bland s-t-r-i-p-mall facade. The red photo is probably your best bet.
And now, I would like to have a stern word with you about supporting photos. The purpose of your supporting photo is to help reviewers find the submission within the larger context of its environment. What message are you trying to convey to reviewers by taking a photo of a **** mall sidewalk? If you're trying to show pedestrian access that's truly not necessary here-- if there was no pedestrian access then nobody would be able to make it from the parking lot to the door of the restaurant and there wouldn't be a business to submit. Step back. Take a photo of the restaurant within its larger context. I can't even begin to tell you how many otherwise-excellent submissions I've rejected because the submitter's supporting photo didn't give me even the tiniest of breadcrumbs to help me find the submission. It's probably not as big a deal in this particular instance as my rant makes it out to be, but DO NOT EVER TURN AND TAKE A SIDEWAYS PHOTO FOR A SUBMISSION unless you have some rock solid reason for doing so. You don't, I promise you.
OK, I've gotten that out of my system. (-:
Your text reasonably good, but here's the description I would write: "Jabo and his wife Susan make everything from scratch, including 22 varieties of sauce for the Louisiana-recipe pit smoked barbecue. Voted Best BBQ in Denver,. The Sconuts are legendary." You want to use this text to paint a picture for reviewers, convince them that it's an interesting place. (And frankly, it is. I'm hungry for barbecue now.) Make it tight and punchy and compelling.
I'm running out of steam for supporting text but you've gotten some good feedback from others. Instead, I'm going to leave you with this article that I wrote a few months ago-- How to submit things that get accepted. The TL;dr is that your submission is a glossy marketing brochure for the wayspot, and you should carefully examine your submission from the perspective of a reviewer to make sure its importance and the key details are clear to reviewers. Don't make reviewers do any work to find extra info, because they won't.
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/9890/how-to-submit-things-that-get-accepted
[Note: edited to dodge the forum's aggressive starring of a word that means a long narrow piece of land or material, a newspaper's comic format, a type of mall, a place to land a plane, to remove paint, to remove extraneous material... I decided on the edit because I thought the particular style of mall was relevant to the discussion.]