That power is unsurprisingly sullied by those wishing to cheat the system. A Harvard Business School study in 2016 found that a one-star increase of a restaurant's overall rating on Yelp led to a five to nine percent increase in revenue.
The power bestowed on each individual diner is daunting to chefs and restaurant staff, whose livelihoods often depend on the success of their establishment. Any restaurant experience - good, bad, or routine - can be widely propagated online. You no longer have to be Pete Wells to be a published restaurant critic (though when finding places to review, even Wells uses Yelp). Yelp and others do what the Internet does best: dress the novice as an authority. And like all social media, it’s complicated, noisy, and regrettably vulnerable to bad actors. Though it might appear to be something nobler, Yelp is still social media.
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And because food’s gamut runs from near-inedible famine food to works of art from the finest dining experiences, and professional critics usually stick to the latter, Yelp is particularly useful for evaluating the vast majority of restaurants, which would otherwise go unnoticed. Food uniquely sits at the intersection of entertainment and necessity, art and utility, luxury and subsistence.
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And while images of art and recordings of music are free online, there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Though many argue that art and music are indispensable to the human experience, food is indispensable to life. We are endowed with a built-in food critic in the form of a tongue and a brain that immediately passes judgment on every bite. What qualifications are really necessary to be a food critic though? Most people in the world have extensive experience with both cooking and eating, some even practicing both crafts on an individual level three times a day. Similarly, art critic Ana Finel Honigman writes that “for all critics, a pre-requisite for the role of judging the art of others should be a period of struggle in the studio.” Irish playwright Bernard Shaw famously wrote that a music critic of any merit “must have a cultivated taste for music he must be a skilled writer and he must be a practised critic.” A theater critic should have experience in the industry, writes Najla Said. It makes sense that professional food critics like Wells be professionally associated with their respective art form. Wells’ stature in New York’s culinary world means his negative reviews carry particular weight to readers and restaurateurs alike. While Wells is no Ego in that he does not write mostly negative reviews, his most famous pieces include the sharp censure of Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar, owned by Guy Fieri, and the two-star downgrade of Thomas Keller’s restaurant Per Se in 2016. The fact that Wells’ picture can be found hanging on the wall of many New York restaurant kitchens is a sign of the real fear he evokes in restaurateurs’ hearts. His Twitter profile picture, the Muppet Statler, calls to mind the role of the cantankerous, unpleasable heckler (with a side of self-consciousness about Wells’ own position). There are a few of the same characteristics in Pete Wells, the New York Times’ restaurant critic since 2012. The stereotypes of food critics are distilled into the vampiric Anton Ego from Ratatouille: a nocturnal, wan figure whose sophisticated tastes, formidable standards, and caustic opinions stand to ruin the reputation of any urban chef. With restaurants’ reputations and restaurateurs’ livelihoods at stake, the question remains: How much should Yelp ratings really matter? That said, Yelp, where anyone can be a food critic, suffers from the same disinformation problem as more traditional social media, despite its stellar reputation. As the dangers of blindly trusting social media surface in public conversation, Yelp, a place whose content as many as 91 percent of people say they trust as much as a friend, seems immune to it all. An online dilettante can enjoy simultaneous avocations on platforms like Instagram, Medium, and TikTok, where blue checkmarks and easily gained large followings can lend authority to otherwise normal people.
Social media is all about bringing that which was previously reserved for professionals to the masses.
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