You know, at the risk of heaping on the negativity, I read their Yelp ratings and while some are excellent, others are genuinely a sign of a restaurant in crisis.
Consider the gentleman from New Zealand who made reservations via an email to the owner five weeks in advance, spent the afternoon walking around downtown LA to avoid rush hour traffic, and then showed up only to be told that they were closed for a wine tasting. Or, there was the reviewer who got the point of the restaurant, but still found the flavours rather difficult. Or heck, consider the endless comments about how poor the service was.
I take a couple of things away from this:
- No matter how interesting your product is, you still need to please your customers.
- When you're emotionally invested in something, it is tempting to set aside criticism as being gratuitously negative. But, sometimes your critics are your best advisers.
I'm also glad for this. I've always had a love/hate relationship with Yelp.
Sometimes there are places that I've known forever to be a hidden gem. Now they've become Yelp 5-star and the place gets great business but wait times are always an hour.
Sometimes I'm in a new city and I just Yelp for the latest and greatest. This can lead me to some of the best food I've had, complete with menu suggestions and tips from other users. This is where Yelp really excels. It gives great businesses the business they deserve.
Where Yelp fails me is when restaurants get hurt by harsh and poorly written reviews. A few one stars will even make people avoid a business. I've been to a ton of 3 star restaurants personally recommended to me by a friend and they've been fantastic. When I read the Yelp reviews people will rate 1 star for entirely subjective reasons, even worse for poor service when the explained situation seems completely one-sided. It's one thing to give a highly rated place a second opinion, saying it's overrated. It's another thing to harm an innocent small business and in a way preventing other people from giving the place a chance.
And even with well-reviewed places, for large cities there are hundreds of great places buried in the 4-star <100 reviews list. How many people really scroll past the 5 or 6th page when viewing Most Reviewed and Highest Rated?
The last straw would have to be the extortionist behavior of their sales team. But, that's an entirely different story.
Agreed. However, with reviews in general (and restaurant reviews especially), I have discovered that my experiences and the experiences of reviewers (both good and bad) are simply not well correlated. It wasn't always this way -- a decade or so ago, reviews had value to me. But something has changed.
I've eaten at places that appeared good if you read the reviews, but turned out to be horrible, and I've eaten at places that had terrible reviews but turned out to be fantastic.
If you get value from reviews, though, that's great!
This was the second time I really read through reviews on yelp. The first time I was reading reviews about a restaurant I love and reviewing it myself. And when I say I don't trust yelp, I meant the user base :)
The quality of Yelp must be location-specific. Where I live, Yelp reviews are borderline worthless with chain restaurants with mediocre food and service scoring at or above legitimately worthwhile restaurants. I don't know whether to attribute that to the gaming of reviews or the pedestrian tastes of the Yelp reviewers in my area.
This may be the case in San Francisco. It's not the case elsewhere, however, at least for this anecdotal sample size of one. :)
Business travel takes me all over the country and Yelp is incredibly reliable. I've lost track of the number of times that someone recommends a place, Yelp says it's a 2-3 star place, we go anyway, and yup, it's average at best.
I hear and see the complaints of restauranteurs about Yelp. Yet my experiences at places usually match what's seen in reviews. There's a restaurant in my hometown where the owner, a friend of mine, constantly complained about Yelp reviews where the the sentiment was that his food was too expensive and not of consistent quality (I agreed with the reviews). A few weeks ago he decided to close the place because of declining revenues. Had he listened to the reviews, settled for a bit less margin, and worked with his staff to produce a consistent product he'd still be in business.
Edit: I neglected to add that it's really important to read reviews for context. Sometimes you just have people bitching because they're a gluten-sensitive nut-allergic vegan and the place didn't cater to their highly specific needs.
I find this to be particularly bad with Americans and Brits. I don't really use yelp much anymore, but when you're on holiday and look at tripadvisor reviews of restaurants, it always seems to be the Americans and Brits complaining the otherwise great restaurants are bad because they don't do some awful shit that no one in their right mind would ever expect a really good seafood restaurant on the coast in Spain to do (e.g.).
These days, reviews on all platforms are more useful as a way to avoid genuninely awful places. As someone else said, ignore the average rating, but check a few comments to see if there's a consistent negative theme.
Really strange to see the negative comments. My favorite thing about TripAdvisor is that I feel empowered when I have a terrible experience at a venue. I can just go leave them a crappy review. It's very cathartic.
Also, I find most of the reviews to be generally accurate. It sounds like other people disagree with that which is strange. I've never used TripAdvisor to find a restaurant or a hotel and then felt like the reviews were faked.
It's kinda hard to tell from the article whether "negative" means one-star or, like, three-stars. Because yeah, there are quite a few people who tend to overreact to a less-than-ideal experience where they feel compelled to leave a one-star review because the check took an extra ten minutes to arrive. And surely anyone with a shred of empathy would cut a brand new restaurant some slack if it's not perfect on the first week.
OTOH, people seem to think you're being mean if you leave a 2-3/5 review for a restaurant, and at some point we should acknowledge the fact that some places are just mediocre. And if I go to a thoroughly mediocre Italian restaurant, I don't think it's mean to leave it a mediocre rating, because the average person should know that there are four better Italian restaurants within 15 miles they could go to.
There is another big negative about using ratings when dining out that no one talks about.
My friends and I were recently discussing how we haven't had a bad experience in any restaurant in awhile. But now we are so used to really good restaurants that it is extremely rare to get amazed by any restaurant.
If we compare this to our experiences in pre-Yelp era, it was so exciting to discover an amazing restaurant. Sure we ate at a lot of mediocre restaurants but joy of finding something amazing was greater back then.
I am not sure what the solution is. Stop looking up ratings?
I've always wondered if reviews are negatively skewed. Sadly, there's much more incentive for me to go on Yelp and write about how awful my meal was than about it being decent.
>Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. Plus Yelp has a bad history of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.
Agreed, the individual reviews are usually useless. But their aggregate star rating is great. A 4.5 star place with hundreds of reviews is guaranteed to be amazing without fail. 4 star is always decent. But anything 3.5 and less is guaranteed to be mediocre or bad. I eat out almost every day in SF/east bay and this has yet to fail me.
Bad Yelp reviews can safely be ignored most of the times. Some of the best tasting restaurants I went to have 2 to 3 stars, and they are hugely popular. It seems they don't care about the rating and relying on providing the best food and best service.
Online restaurant reviews (and doctor reviews) always skew negative because those who have had bad experience are left frustrated and impotent and a scathing online review is one of the few avenues open to them, while those who have had a good experience are unmotivated to write anything.
On a related note, I’ve been getting overwhelmed with “How’d we do?” after the fact online surveys lately - doctor visits, rental car, retail shopping - and I can’t help but wonder if along with actually trying to improve their services, these surveys act to manage the narrative. That if I can complain to them, I won’t complain to Google, yelp or TripAdvisor.
Some of these Yelp reviews are priceless! I like the self-referential ones (or is it self-anticipatory?) where people write predictive reviews based on their expected dislike of the restaurant in advance of actually visiting it. Also priceless is the one referenced in the article where the restaurant manager steals away the reviewer's girlfriend, so he goes and sulks there once a week in a dark corner booth.
Yelp's fundamental flaw is the fact that you can't tell real from fabricated reviews. You have to read with a skeptical eye and any overly gushing praise or overly nasty criticism of a particular business is suspect. I tend to trust the three and four star reviews over the 1's, 2's, and 5's.
Amazon at least has the advantage of identifying people who actually bought the product, and there is the option to comment on a review. It's not perfect but can be useful. Yelp's reviewers seem a bit under-vetted by comparison.
I mostly like and use Yelp, and I get the negativity.
What your saying about knowing how to use Yelp is right on, but it leads to some dissatisfaction, because a 4 star restaurant should be a 4 star restaurant. More importantly, they manipulate ratings. They pressure businesses to pay them to fix ratings Yelp broke. They let businesses improve ratings when they shouldn't, analogous to Glassdoor and Amazon users getting ratings they don't like kicked off or hidden. There are plenty of fake and misleading reviews. And they have lots of dark patterns e.g. pushing you to their mobile app from the web, requiring you to create an account, etc. Some of these are observable by everyone, others there are many anecdotes.
They're not going away. They provide value to people, me included. But some negativity directed their way makes sense to me.
I too travel all around the country for business, and I find Yelp to be less than helpful. I agree with you that reading the reviews for context is critical. In fact, that's the only way to really get a read on a place. But with hundreds of restaurants to choose from, and hundreds of reviews each (if there are only a handful of reviews, you can't rely on them at all), it's incredibly time consuming to go through them. I find that the star ratings are pretty much worthless. They get dragged down by people who ding fine dining restaurants for not having Olive Garden prices, and others who mark down local greasy spoons for not having French Laundry service. I don't care how the diner compares to the French Laundry. I care how it compares to other diners. A single rating scale across all types of restaurants is probably counterproductive, but the problem is greatly magnified by throngs of clueless reviewers who have bogus expectations and are rating places based on them.
My issue with places like Yelp is that people could post a negative review for the silliest of reasons and it can be hard to tell if the restaurant actually messed up or the person had different tastes than me, crazy expectations, or caused the problems themselves. I just don't trust them. If I had, I would never have discovered and repeatedly enjoyed some of my favourite restaurants.
For something like a contractor working on your house, yea it's important to see those reviews. For a meal? I'd rather just take a chance based on a lot of people saying they had a good time. It's what you do anyway when you check out a new restaurant based on a friend's recommendation or just on a whim.
And the whole point is not to have any star system, you either liked it or loved it and that's it. No opportunity for commentary so if you want to complain, go elsewhere. The tagline I dreamed up was "Haters gonna hate, eaters gonna eat."
Consider the gentleman from New Zealand who made reservations via an email to the owner five weeks in advance, spent the afternoon walking around downtown LA to avoid rush hour traffic, and then showed up only to be told that they were closed for a wine tasting. Or, there was the reviewer who got the point of the restaurant, but still found the flavours rather difficult. Or heck, consider the endless comments about how poor the service was.
I take a couple of things away from this:
- No matter how interesting your product is, you still need to please your customers.
- When you're emotionally invested in something, it is tempting to set aside criticism as being gratuitously negative. But, sometimes your critics are your best advisers.
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