Every meal at a restaurant begins the same way. The waiter sets the plate down with a flourish. You ready your cutlery, lay your napkin on your lap, and reach out to spoon the food onto your plate. Suddenly, there’s a flash, and then another, as your dining companion takes photo after photo for their Yelp or Tripadvisor review. The food grows cold. But the verdict? Already ready.
Reams have been written about food and travel influencers and reviewers; chefs, restaurateurs and hoteliers have freely bandied their opinions, online and off. A nuanced, well-thought-out judgement by a fully informed reviewer, they opine, is rare. On the other hand, critics of this critique believe that these online reviewers have a real role to play in a democratized media environment. On balance, social media is a force for the better, they believe.
Does the same hold true for platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor? These are platforms built from the ground up on mass public opinion; their entire operation is premised on the fact that the aggregated public has a voice that is more useful than any lone one, including that of a trained, paid critic.
But even they don’t seem to trust every opinion. TripAdvisor regularly weeds out nearly 10 per cent of the reviews on its own website, citing paid placements, reputation manipulation, and reviews with no firsthand basis as the cause. Yelp operates in largely the same way, elbowing reviewers away from fraud and coerced opinions by suppressing reviews that the site believes do not come from an actual visit, to the point of splitting opinions into ‘recommended’ and ‘not recommended’ sections
Quite famously, Anthony Bourdain, opined that the Yelp Elite reviewer was the lowest creature, the most loathsome of all. “There’s really no worse, or lower human being than an elite Yelper,” he said. “They’re universally loathed by chefs everywhere. They are the very picture of entitled, negative energy. They’re bad for chefs, they’re bad for restaurants. You know, you open a restaurant, you struggle for a year to put together the money, you work your heart out, and then 10 minutes after opening, some miserable b-stard is tweeting or Yelping, ‘Worst. Dinner. Ever.’
It’s like, dude. That ain’t right. Nah, no sympathy there. And I think you’d have a very hard time finding a chef who has anything nice to say about elite Yelpers. It’s a contradiction of terms. It’s like jumbo shrimp. How can you be elite and a Yelper?”
On the other hand, he believed Instagram and Twitter to largely be a force of good, a “fully democratic bathroom wall” on which reviewers etched their points of view, and viewers were welcome to believe or reject them.
Whether Yelp agreed with this devastating critique or not (they didn’t) wasn’t the point. The point is that democratization might not always be the answer – bad ratings on Yelp can impact revenues, not necessarily of fancy restaurants or big chains, but certainly that of the lone neighborhood mom-and-pop eatery.
And this age-old kerfuffle stems from a bigger question. That is, who holds the right to judge someone else’s work?
Is might not always right? Is the collective voice not better than that of the individual? Who then, is a reliable reviewer? Should the onus lie only on the trained critic, sipping expensive wine in rarefied restaurants? Shouldn’t every voice carry an equal weight? Multiple reviews simply meant a platform (or influencer) had tremendous reach; it didn’t necessarily mean that the critique was right. All opinions therefore, were not equally valid, unless they were trained opinions. While the platforms weed out undesirable critiques, perhaps the solution is to credential each reviewer so readers can assume some context behind each review. The judge can therefore be judged.
This doesn’t mean the crowd-sourced reviews are worthless. Word of mouth still holds tremendous weight in the hospitality industry, and certainly far more than that of any elite restaurant critic. This is the power of the public in its purest form. But it’s equally important to remember that volume doesn’t immediately equal authority. Sometimes, volume is just volume.
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