Born: 1942 (circa), United States (assumed)
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Nina Safronoff
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Another famed foodie and Le Cordon Bleu alumna is Nina Zagat, co–founder of the eponymous Zagat guide. Born in 1942, Zagat and her husband/co-founder Tim were corporate lawyers who started their informal Zagat survey in 1979 as a hobby, a newsletter distributed among friends and family with collections of ratings and reviews for restaurants. It wasn’t until 1982 that they started selling the guide through New York City bookstores. Zagat later said, “it was expensive for us to do it, but for us, it was turning an after-tax expenditure into a pre-tax expenditure. We were, at that point, turning it into what might be a business, although that wasn’t what we were about. It wasn’t why we were doing it. We were just trying to make sure we were covering our expenses, and then all of a sudden it just caught on and everybody had interest in it.”
By 1987, the guide had expanded beyond New York City to publications for Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. and Tim had quit his law job to work full-time on the guide, with Zagat doing the same by 1990. “In 1987 it was a matter of ‘this is really happening.’ Either we’ve got to pay attention to this and help it grow, nurture this business and really devote the time that it needs, or we’ve got to stop doing it, because you can’t do everything. So, I think that was the primary impetus then. It was really deciding, okay, are we going to turn this into a real business or not, and we decided that we were going to turn it into a real business,” she later said. In the following decades, their guides would cover 70 markets, and extend into rating guides for shopping, nightlife, hotels, plays, and even movies. In 2011, Google purchased The company for a reputed $151 million.