It depends… if I go to a restaurant, and see one or two local awards from 15 years ago, I’m likely to view that with a jaundiced eye and wonder what’s changed.
However, if I go, and they are displaying awards that they’ve consistently received over time, it’s usually something that I’ll consider a positive thing.
around here our local newspaper does a huge campaign about the "best of our region " this and that every year and people send in votes every year and the results get a special 20 page insert in the paper …some places have been here so long that they are disqualified from the vote and are given “legend” status
In Los Angles, restaurants are required to prominently post the results of the latest health inspection, as a letter grade. I pretty much never see anything other than “A”. Apparently, the reason is that if a restaurant gets anything less than “A”, it’s business drops so much that they have to fix the problem immediately.
Thought about this thread a few weeks ago when I was at a joint and the sticker in the door window proudly informed me that they were a local high school band booster… in 2017. That feels even weirder to keep up than winning an award since it implies that you’ve spent the last five years saying “Nah” to giving more money. What, your investment didn’t work out?
I was in a dive bar once that had a framed “C” on display. They didn’t serve food, so there wasn’t a “real” health department sticker. The bartender explained that the owner had a friend who worked for the health department and he got the sticker to use as a joke.
Old accolades aren’t going to do any harm by themselves. If they have degraded and look bad of course it doesn’t help. An award from some kind of offensive organization is not a good idea to keep displaying. Otherwise, go for it. There’s a restaurant not far away that displays a photo of Babe Ruth taken there nearly 100 years ago. The place has had multiple owners, the photo gets sold along with it because it represents a lot of the restaurant’s value.