“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
I’m an aspiring Yelp Elite—aka a power reviewer who’s left enough reviews with enough content that I get a nice little demarcator on my name. However, in my frenzy to pump out reviews for restaurant after restaurant, I still falter when it comes to assigning how many stars a place should get. Should I leave 5 stars to this brunch joint despite the egregiously long wait? Shall I drop a 3-star review on a mom-and-pop shop, which is struggling in a difficult environment but gave me food that led to a stomache ache? Or even simpler: should 5 stars be a reward for the best of the best restaurant? Or just an indicator of overall quality?
My thoughts flit back to my on schildhood favorite movie, Ratatouille, and how food critics were villainized for their scathing remarks. Yelp’s accessibility is a blessing and a curse: now, anyone can be a food critic, but that’s the thing—anyone can be a food critic. When I search through Yelp for a place for dinner, I scroll through an aggregate of people’s opinions, which trends towards overhyped places that may not be actually quality. Moreover, Yelp reviews are inundated by people driven by passion, which can be helpful if it’s positive and detracting if it’s hateful. Yes, restaurants should hold themselves to good service, but complaints on Yelp that drive down reviews for understandably human mistakes—like long delivery times, incorrect orders, standoffish waiters—put unnecessary pressure on restaurant owners and provides cherry-picked opinions to potential patrons.
How do we measure restaurants beyond a 5-star system, which leaves such little granular detail to the point of imprecision? From my experience, food preferences can be deeply contextual. It’s hard to extrapolate a random person’s experience with a restaurant with how I would feel about it—unless I’m confident that that random person x shares similar food preferences as me, which may be determined by cultural upbringings, social economic statuses, or more simply (and nebulously)…
✨ vibes ✨
Perhaps this is why our irl way of asking for food recs is to reach out to friends, acquaintances, co-workers—people in our inner circles who have opinions we trust. And our other option is to scroll through Instagram and Tik Tok or read food magazines to hear from content creators who curate recommendations—another form of fostering trust. Yelp has the best of worst worlds, as it shied away from social features and spotlights reviews over personas. The separation of the review from the reviewer may help in information overload about a restaurant, but it’s hard to get actionable steps when you’re bomboarded with random details.
What do I think Yelp can do? It could move towards persona-driven recommendations. As an Asian American interested in fusion, I want to hear the recs from fellow ABCs with a penchant for black-sesame-crunchy-butter and durian-cheesecake flavor combos. I’m less interested in burger joints, which may be the “popular” opinion. I think Yelp can guide this content curation similar to Pinterest or Spotify, both similar companies with user-input but much more curated experiences. A better recommendation engine based on a user’s demographics, or an opportunity to learn more about the creator behind the review.