The yelp review paint a picture of
2010: Great food, great service
2011: Good to great food, horrible service
2012: Horrible food, horrible service
I usually don't trust yelp, but the decline is way too visible here.
I usually don't trust yelp, but the decline is way too visible here.
Some people think the issue with yelp and google reviews is trust. Its not. Its entitlement and a lack of proper criteria. The types of people who gravitate towards these reviews and become frequent reviewers are often people with poor taste and a lack of understanding of what they are reviewing. They're not crowd-sourced Robger Eberts. They're your cranky local paper's film critic who thinks 'naughty language' is the most unforgivable sin.
If anything, services like yelp have made me appreciate the art of criticism and a lot of my dining decisions are now done via professional critics with good reputations instead of the usual gang of misanthropes and weirdos who dominate yelp.
Many Asian restaurants in the Bay Area that I like are 3 or 3.5 stars, though many others with that rating are mediocre. But on the low or high end, it seems very accurate.
There's a great ice cream place near me that gets complaints about their customer service. You're buying an ice cream cone! It takes like 3 sentences; how much service do you need? No joke, there are 2-star reviews like "Stopped by after dinner; the line was out the door and the owner seemed tired. The ice cream was delicious though."
So, you are told of a credible example of a restaurant being sabotaged on one user-content-based website by opponents, and then turn to another user-content-based notorious for fake reviews & astroturfing, and see an abrupt & extraordinary decline on every axis, and rather than take this as additional evidence of the sabotage campaign, you take this as evidence that the restaurant was declining simultaneously with the sabotage campaign? Interesting reasoning there.
Check the reviews, there's also how many reviews and friends the person has. The lower these two numbers are, the most likely the review is fake (either pro or against)
Also check how balanced the review is. Most legitimate ones are fair, and won't go over the top either way
And of course, there's always someone that's going to complain about a sushi restaurant serving raw fish.