The Skinny Food and Drink Survey 2013

The Olympics, the Diamond Jubilee, the discovery of the Higgs boson, and the eventual destruction of the entire world as predicted by the Mayans. Important milestones, sure, but all of these pale into insignificance when compared to the most important event of the year, the launch of the second annual edition of The Skinny’s Food and Drink survey.

OK, maybe not, but you can’t blame us for trying to hype this bad boy up. The alternative to doing so would be to simply print a web address in two inch-high lettering and tell you all to beat it. Or, y’know, to go out and review and rate everywhere ourselves.

But we haven’t done that, and with good reason. Food isn’t like music or film, where everyone’s frame of reference matches up. Here’s an example: If a review of band X says that band X sound like band Y, you can go and listen to both of them and judge for yourself. The crucial part is that the comparison made, and the material reviewed, are easily referenced by you, the reader. Now try applying that to food: “This fish that you haven’t tasted was similar to the other fish I had, which you also haven’t tasted. Umm... three stars.”

Much better, we thought, to get everyone’s opinions together and smoosh them all up to find out where most of you like to eat and drink. So that’s what we did last year, and what we’re doing again. See, now you’re on board. Maybe not with the ‘bigger than the Queen’ business, but we’ll see how you feel in a few hundred words’ time.

After all, we did sift through around 1000 of your responses to last year’s survey and compiled them into lists of the best places for food and drink in Scotland. We also asked folk musicians about the magic of Fife chip shops, marvelled at the moustaches of coffee aficionados, and sent two of our readers on a blind date. We still can’t believe we pulled that off, and managed to get the photos to prove it. Tee-hee.

Still, the survey wasn’t without its flaws. For starters, we managed to enrage a lot of you with a near endless stream of questions and categories to fill in, then we compounded the issue by creating fiddly categories to confuse you and defy your logical ways of categorising things. Sorry ‘bout that.

We’ve kept things simple this time around, and trimmed the survey down to the key issues; which are the good pubs, where can I go for a cheap bite to eat, who do I have to viciously shake to get a decent coffee, and so on. It’ll be a celebration of Scottish food and drink, and at the same time it could descend into a massive bun fight over who makes the best sandwich in a particular Glasgow street. Either way, it’s worth getting involved with.

You can fill in the survey now at bit.ly/theskinnyfood, and if you follow us on Twitter or are our friends on Facebook then we’ll be along shortly to badger you into doing so. Once you have done so, just relax, safe in the knowledge that several months from now your opinion will be smashed together with all the others in a reconstructed knowledge slurry. So, that’s The Skinny Food and Drink survey 2013: “Using unappetising metaphors to encourage audience participation.” Well, when you’re in charge of as big an event as this, you need a catchy tagline...

Note: The Skinny Food & Drink Survey is now closed. You can view our results here.