Phantom Gourmet

The Phantom Gourmet is a food-related television program featuring profiles of New England area restaurants. The show airs on WSBK-TV in Boston, Massachusetts, WLWC in Providence, Rhode Island, and WPME in Portland, Maine each Saturday and Sunday morning, with a half-hour episode composed of older clips followed by an hour-long episode (either new or rerun). While the original format featured reviews by the "The Phantom Critic" and numerical ratings of the restaurants, the reviews and numerical ratings have been discontinued. The show continues to feature local restaurants but focuses on describing dishes and profiling chefs and owners. Comments on Yelp and other sites discuss whether the profiles are a form of paid advertising. In late spring of 2006, the company behind the show came out with its first Boston restaurant guide, entitled The Phantom Gourmet Guide to Boston's Best Restaurants.

In addition to restaurant profiles, the show features interviews with restaurant owners and chefs, a segment on determining the best grocery item of a chosen category(Top of the Food Chain), and a segment on recipes. The show also gives a Great 8 selection of restaurants that are the best in their category, and a Hidden Jewel that features a unique restaurant that people may not have heard of. At the end of each show, a Dish Worth Driving To award is awarded, which is a restaurant in the outlying areas of the Metro Boston area (though sometimes as far away as Rhode Island or New Hampshire).

When the show was still assigning numerical ratings to restaurants, the rating was based on ten criteria: atmosphere, menu, appetizers, entrees, desserts, portion sizes, service, cleanliness, value, and location. Each element was rated 1 - 10, leading to final rankings of:

The program broadcast its first episode on June 26, 1993, on New England Cable News with host Billy Costa. The show gained a cult following almost immediately and was given a Best of Boston award by Boston Magazine in 1994 for Best Talk Show. NECN broadcast the show for a decade.

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