One man, one scale, one increasingly specific opinion about mascarpone.

The Gallagher Scale is named after Mark Gallagher. Mark knows food. The scale was the obvious response.

Mark is not a professional chef. Mark has never worked in a restaurant. Mark has, however, been the person you text at 6:41 PM on a Thursday when you need to know where to take your in-laws in the North End, and Mark will answer within ninety seconds, and Mark will be right.

A Full Gallagher – 1.00 – means a restaurant that would leave Mark without a complaint. In Boston, over three years, this has happened four times. Not that anyone is counting.

Ratings weigh food above everything. Atmosphere and service are noted – they can lift an experience, rarely a score – the food has never once cared about the walls. Sometimes the math ain't mathing. The food is usually why.

A separate category exists for one dessert.The IRC – Italian Rum Cake – is what Mark called tiramisu for roughly a decade or two before anyone told him. By the time the mistake was identified, the name had already stuck. It now appears on every review, rated 0.00 – 1.00, independently of the restaurant's overall score. A perfect restaurant can have a weak IRC. It has happened. It has been devastating.

1.00

The Full Gallagher

Absolute perfection. No notes. The meal you bring up unprompted, months later, at an unrelated dinner.

0.90

Near-perfect

So close it has a name. The name is 0.9.

0.80

Very good

A meal worth returning to. The return would be more strategic.

0.70

It's complicated

Worth it in parts. The parts are not evenly distributed.

0.60

Compromised

A restaurant on probation. Something came out of that kitchen that was worth it. Other things should have stayed hidden.

0.50

Unfortunate

The food showed up. So did you. Neither of you wanted to be there. Nothing was worth the effort or cost. The whole experience was a mistake, but not a traumatic one.

0.40

Regrettable

The kitchen made decisions. The decisions were wrong. We watched them arrive at the table.

0.30

Catastrophe

Someone thought of this. Someone made it. They shouldn't have. The ingredients deserved better.

0.20

Abomination

What came out of that place was not, by any reasonable definition, food. Was it intentional? We have no other explanation.

0.10

We do not name this restaurant

We refer to it only by the street intersection. The trauma is still fresh (it's been 84 years).

0.00

The Anti-Gallagher

A meal so structurally offensive it inverts the scale. We do not know if anyone will ever earn this. We hope not.