Story time: I once read a one star review on a restaurant in Boston which boiled down to "waiter was black". I flagged the review and yelp got back to me that "they tried to include all relevant opinions." This was about a decade ago, but the experience has always left me with the opinion that review sites could do more to keep reviews topical by promoting ratings of the separate parts of an item. Also, they should allow you to flag racism.
I worked in a few kitchens for a few years. I regularly read reviews on yelp and I would say that near half of the negative "reviews" that showed up on there that pertained to what I myself witnessed or pertained to the kitchen were mostly to totally unfair. The one's that were fair I owned. One of my favorites: one star review for not being seated without a reservation on mother's day. Another favorite review: "I've been a regular here for quite a while and love this place but my porridge was too cold this one time: one star." Another gem: "Food is A+, waiter only refilled our water once: one star." (Pretty much any negative review that centers on waiters can be disregarded; they don't want to eat, they want to be served). I also witnessed outright lies by apparently angry and, I assume, tortured miserable people who were looking to be displeased in every realm of their life. You find those kinds of people in fine dining a lot, rich entitled pensioner types with no respect whatsoever. Unless there's a major sanitation or corruption issue on yelp reviews I take them about as seriously as youtube comments.
This is a general problem with reviews. If it’s written text it’s often possible to figure out whether a certain criticism is valid for you personally.
Some people are very sensitive to wait times, I’m just not at all. I can always discount all reviews complaining about wait times because there isn’t enough useful signal there. Sure, even I don’t want to wait three hours for my food, but most people seem to complain way before that and that’s just not relevant information to me.
Contrary, when people tell me what a great experience they had with the staff and that the owner came to their table and chatted with them I know I should probably avoid that restaurant because I just can’t stand any staff or owners acting like they are my best friends immediately.
So, sure, for written reviews it’s often possible to see whether a criticism is relevant for your own personal tastes, but all those review places also implement star ratings and those are used to display and filter the places you are shown in the first place. So you might not even see a place you like because it got bad ratings based on (completely valid, by the way, I’m not saying other people have to also be as tolerant of wait times as I am!) factors you personally don’t care about.
This affects other places as well, for example apps in app stores. I’m not sure how to solve this, to be honest, but that seems like a cool problem to tackle. I’m imagining Netflix-like personalised lists of restaurants or hotels you might like, not these dumb global star ratings.
Does this already exist somewhere? I feel like it should. Surely someone must have already tried that …
Yelp reviews for ethnic food and fine dining are usually pretty poor in my opinion and also have similar issues as food critics. Also why would I care about the masses opinion on food? I'd rather read review from people who really care and know about food.
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.
The problem with Yelp for me is that it lumps every review together, when I'm part of a niche market. I wish there were a review service that matched me with restaurants people like me (similar background, favorite restaurants, etc.) enjoy.
I absolutely loathe yelp reviews. Far too many people trying to act like professional reviewers spending 500 words on setting the scene of the restaurant only to end up on 2/5 stars because of something ridiculous like bad lighting. This is all within given context, but there's been so many reviews for smaller divey type places that get people slamming it over stuff only to end up with a single line of "food wasn't bad though".
Reminds me of how different people appreciate and create distinctions between "high art", pop art, lowbrow art, and outsider art.
Reading Yelp reviews makes me cringe at all the people who demand attentive service from restaurant staff, and all the attention to venue and atmosphere. Personally, when I go to a restaurant, generally I go to find some tasty food, atmosphere is always besides the point. Obviously some people factor in obscure details of food venue experiences to their reviews and they care about those things. As in music, some people love obscure subgenres of repetitive techno or metal, or specific renditions of classical songs played at a certain venue during a specific point in time by a regional musician, played at a specific pacing.
Reviews are always someone else's opinion, which is great if the reviewer can articulate the goods and bads of their personal experience for others to relate to.
What Happens When Second Graders Are Treated to a Seven-Course, $220 Tasting Meal
Main flaws from his conclusion:
1. "Don't filter reviews. If the site is supposed to be "Yelper" driven and democratic, so be it. Post them all!" The reviews are for Fior D'italia ARE posted, a handful are removed (10 out of 218+115 filtered reviews). The other 300 reviews are still there, which should be more than sufficient for someone to decide if they want to eat at that place. Of the 115 filtered reviews, ~50 of them were 4-5 star reviews made by reviewers with less than 3 reviews, it seems logical to filter those out.
2. "Allow businesses to opt out". Yelp shouldn't let them. It's the internet. There is some truth in this, but yelp exists to filter out the good and bad restaurants. I can see some lawsuits coming out of this.
3. "Give businesses a chance to post comments or respond at the top of their Yelp page where the public can read it before going to the reviews". If yelp were to do that, then businesses could just stall the bad reviews and only keep the good ones, rendering the review system useless.
4. "Post the filtered reviews where they are easy to find and review. Many customers of ours have had their reviews of the Fior filtered out, and they are livid." Filtered reviews are at the bottom, and they are pretty easy to find. As I said, the filtered reviews, have reasoning to be filtered in the first place.
5. Continued from above: "They don't understand why this is done, nor do we". I understand why those reviews were filtered perfectly. Of the 115 reviews, ~50 were 5 or 4 star reviews made by reviewers with less than 3 reviews, I can see why they would be filtered because they're probably bots.
Yelp's system is decent. If you only take the 23 Elite members' reviews, they give this place an average rating of ~3-stars, which is a bit better than the overall review. But the owner should really read his reviews, especially the 1-star reviews.
If for some reason, the guy who wrote this article reads this:
1. Read your 1-star reviews, half of them are saying your food is too salty. The other half is saying your service sucks ass, either because your waiters take too long, bad vouchers(?), bad pricing and bad environment. Price, I get for a $$$ restaurant people should be prepared to fork ~$100 for the meal, but I guess the quality wasn't worth the price.
If this guy wanted to take an objective opinion of a yelp review, why not take Ike's place's yelp review with 4,128 reviews.
2. Instead of complaining about it online, why don't you just ask your customers to write reviews. Provide them a link to your yelp review, ask them to review for 10% off or something, put computers with internet browsers with your yelp page as the home page. Make them scream how good or bad your place is.
If I'm ever in the area, I might check this place out, if my wallet can handle it.
But yeah, I've been seeing increasing reviews on how yelp is putting down positive reviews because they don't advertise with them.
The fundamental problem I have with Yelp is that it's full of opinions, not reviews, and people are allowed to post a star rating essentially in a vacuum, which then gets averaged against other star ratings to form a ranking. "The food was great but the waiter didn't fold my napkin properly - 1 star."
There's a reason newspapers hire professional food critics to write about restaurants and film critics to write about movies. It takes training, skill, and insight to write well-written reviews. Most people who write Yelp reviews are perfectly entitled to share their opinion, but not a professional review.
I remember a while ago reading the Yelp reviews of a nightclub in NYC...two different reviews told two very different stories:
"Oh this place is the best. My girlfriends and I showed up, they walked us right in and everyone was buying us drinks all night. So fun! 5 stars"
"This place is terrible. The bouncer made me and my guy friends wait on line for an hour and then charged us $50 each to go in. The drinks were overpriced. 1 star."
So according to Yelp, that place would be ranked 3 stars and I'd essentially know nothing about it.
The other major issue I have is that in almost all non-restaurant business, there is a hugely negative bias. Who goes and posts a positive review after a good experience at the local dry cleaner? Nobody. But if they're rude or lose a shirt, Yelp's going to hear about it.
Right, but presumably the owner can reply with "For the record we only use hand-cut fried cooked in duck fat" to that review?
I am not insensitive to the point, that an individual customer may be poorly placed to be a reliable critic, but I am not sure what the solution is besides somebody with a yelp-type service providing an infrastructure that lets everybody have their say. Not every sector in every town will have an editorially controlled forum for high-quality recommendations.
As a point of interest, do you for example object, say, to tripadvisor as well, or is it something that yelp does in particular?
I keep saying. Yelp needs private ratings, and it needs detailed rating for Elite reviewers. A bad review is a review that praises the meal, but gives 1 star because they couldn't accommodate 8 people in a timely manner. That's all over Yelp. You have to separate the food, the decor and the service.
The thing about yelp that's nice is you can see aggregates, rather than some individual persons good or bad review. This includes, what dishes are popular at a particular place, and how popular regardless of any one opinion is a given restaurant (number of reviews). Additionally, being able to filter for niche things such as specific regional ethnic restaurants.
The actual reviews themselves are honestly the worst part of the whole site.
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."
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.
I really miss Zagat for restaurant reviews. (Thanks for nothing Google.) It seemed to attract a much more thoughtful and informed type of reviewer. For lack of better options, Yelp is still better than nothing but you get a lot of reviewers with seriously unrealistic expectations. My favorite are the reviews for things like (relatively) not-too-expensive NYC hotels that complain about things like the room being too small.
The idea I had for a restaurant review site when I lived in SF was to allow only positive reviews, and it's basically a binary "did you enjoy yourself?" > "yes"/"yes, very much". And require a photo of receipt within X days of posting the review to guard against businesses buying votes. I figured the restaurants with consistent bad service/food would just not bubble up as much as ones with real fans.
Story time: I once read a one star review on a restaurant in Boston which boiled down to "waiter was black". I flagged the review and yelp got back to me that "they tried to include all relevant opinions." This was about a decade ago, but the experience has always left me with the opinion that review sites could do more to keep reviews topical by promoting ratings of the separate parts of an item. Also, they should allow you to flag racism.
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