Semi-Charmed Life

Yelp: A Rant

My friend jigg has a thing about never reading any reviews on Yelp because the reviews are usually shit. I can't say I disagree with him, although I do like to use the aggregate rating from a large number of reviews as a barometer of what I might expect.

A review for Primehouse, a steakhouse that I recently ate at:

2/5 Stars

I came here last month for brunch for the first time. We were promptly sat, and I ordered coffee to start and my date ordered orange juice.

The bread that came out was pretty good and the butter was soft and velvety.

I ended up ordering my go-to breakfast: blueberry pancakes, and my date ordered a burger with fries. I wasn't very impressed by the pancakes. They weren't soft or fluffy. My date didn't like the burger either. My sister tells me she had a great experience here and likes the food, but I don't think I'll be coming back. Maybe I'll come back for dinner to give it a fair chance.

Seriously? You go to a STEAK HOUSE, order something that is NOT steak, and decide to share your useless opinion with the world? How will your review help future steak eating consumers? Do you think I'm looking at Yelp reviews of a steak house because I'm interested in how their fucking pancakes taste? Also, how does this reviewer say that she'll never come back here, directly followed by saying that she might come back here to give it another chance? Make up your mind buddy.

Shitty reviews like this are everywhere on Yelp. Some self-entitled, self-proclaimed foodie brat who feels slighted in the most trivial way will put an establishment on blast. It's okay if a place has a track record of doing whatever it is they do that pisses customers off, but if you're one of those outlier reviews complaining about something, then sometimes it might just be you.

I also find it very annoying when people on Yelp feel the need to give us a long-winded background story on why they were there. Nobody cares that you were there for your grandmother's 80th birthday celebration, especially if it's more than one sentence long. Your grandmother just isn't that important to us. Tell us about the food, the ambiance and the service.

And that right there might be the thing. People don't just want to do that. People fancy themselves as some experts of some sort and write these hopelessly verbose reviews. Maybe secretly everyone on Yelp wanted to be writer at some point in their lives and are living that out one review at a time.

On the flip side, I guess it's nice to see that people are enthusiastic about their food.