Another problem is with platforms like Yelp and TripAdvisor is the fact that they're full of fake reviews.
Plus, people are much more likely to leave a review when they've had a bad experience, distorting the overall restaurant's rating.
That can bring disastrous consequences, especially for smaller businesses that have just opened up – one 2020 study found that an early bad review can turn customers away in the long term, and that reviewing platforms actually have an in-built bias towards popular restaurants.
As Giorgia Cannarella pointed out in Vice, the only other alternative, it seems, is reading food articles and blogs, hoping to land on an honest critique.
However, if you're familiar with the complex world of culinary criticism, you’ll know these things can also be hit or miss. Sometimes a new spot will get stellar reviews only to disappoint once you get there.
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Different people value different aspects of a restaurant – the decor, the ambiance, the price, the surprise factor, but, according to Slovenian food and travel blogger Kaja Sajovic, there’s actually more to the story.
"We all know that food journalists don't get paid enough to cover the cost of a restaurant dinner, so press trips have become a necessity to do our job," Sajovic said. "And this creates a lot of ethical dilemmas. Can you really give a bad review of a restaurant you've been invited to, with flights and hotels covered? I think it's difficult, and maybe even a little bit unfair."
Of course, Sajovic is mostly talking about freelancers and bloggers. Journalists who get a steady salary and their expenses are always covered can be a lot freer when writing their reviews, but they are certainly the exception rather than the rule in the industry.
Food writer Paola Miglio, editor of Peruvian website El Trinche, said she's always made a point to be uncompromising with her opinions.
"If I don't like something, I say so. And I write it down, even when I’ve been invited [to the restaurant]," Miglio said. "In my three years as a food critic at a newspaper, I have only been bullied a handful of times by a restaurant owner or chef on social media. I've never felt the pressure to praise anything or anyone."
"There are few chefs who respond well and in-kind to criticism," food journalist Gabriele Zanatta, who writes for the Italian web magazine Identità Golose, explained.
Zanatta thinks that’s because cooks have historically been mostly hidden figures. It was only with France’s nouvelle cuisine movement of the 60s, which revolutionised international cooking, that chefs have become famous and “even achieved celebrity status over the last two decades,” Zanatta explained. "No wonder they’re intolerant to criticism! They had never been on such a pedestal."
However, Zanatta also believes this chef-centric approach to food writing is slowly dying out. "We’re now paying more attention not only to the food but to all the other aspects that make a restaurant a restaurant," he said. In his experience, chefs nowadays are more willing to listen, provided that the criticism they’re receiving is not just a pretext for a food critic to flaunt their knowledge.