Restaurant Review Guideline and Ethics: It's Time

Earlier this week on his podcast, Andrew Zimmern gave his two cents about how much he dislikes Yelp, how it's on his "shit list" and why he feels that restaurant reviews should be left to the experts.  There is a summary of it here, and within his podcasts he goes onto mention that the site is dangerously unstable and that it gives a forum for uninformed morons to take down a restaurant.

After hearing this, I checked out a few of my favorite restaurants reviews on Yelp and shockingly, was appalled.  An alarming number of the people posting to my favorite restaurants were down right mean, biased, overly critical for no reason, and childish.  In short, Andrew was right.  There are a bunch of idiots out there taking down what have been, are, or could be successful restaurants.

While I agree with his frame of thought, I wasn't angry.  What I felt more than anything was disappointment and asked myself this question: if being part of a community website is a privilege, not a right, then why are we letting people like this ruin our community?

For example, check out some of the unclassy reviews from this "Elite Reviewer" who when reviewing a Jewish style deli, writes the following after having a four out of five star experience "Way to break the cheap Jewish stereotype with exemplary customer service" or comments about a waitstaff "staff who might as well be replaced by guard dogs or just goats".  Nearly everything that she wrote lacked class.

While I don't expect Urbanspoon, Yelp or any other community website to police every comment for their respective content guidelines since it's a totally unrealistic request,  I do expect more out of us.  As members of this community, we need to step up and start policing ourselves and keep it classy.

So listen up: foodies, casual restaurant goers, and 19 you year olds out there that know how to use the internet (but don't know your butt from a hole in the ground).  We're kicking it old school and bringing it back to the basics, with a set of restaurant review guidelines that we should all be able to pledge our allegiance to as functioning members of society.

As a responsible member of a community, when reviewing a business within the hospitality review website:

• Thou shall not write reviews online that thou would not say to the owner's face
• Thou shall not threaten nor extort a business in any manner
• Thou shall not add irrelevant content that won't affect a potential customer's experience
• Thou shall not only write about negative reviews if thou wants to be seen as credible
• Thou SHALL write reviews that thou would be proud to show thou's grandmother or boss
• Thou SHALL assume that thou's review is being viewed every time the business is searched for online
• Thou SHALL remember that service industry employees and business owners are people, that are part of families
• Thou SHALL be a good Samaritan and flag inappropriate reviews to keep thou's site clean of scum

While I know that the battle upon review websites has only begun, let's see what we can do to show the professional reviewers out there that we're not uninformed morons and that we can be responsible.  

As to those people that are uninformed and hateful morons... if they've proven that they're not capable of handling of the responsibilities and affects that the world wide web now offers...then let's ask that their irresponsible and potentially harmful reviews be removed. 

Well, now that we've had he pep talk...I leave you with two hilarious videos of real actors, reading real Yelp reviews and a story about a unique use of one restaurant's negative reviews:

Can you think of any guidelines that I've missed?  Do you think that I'm dead wrong?  If so, why?  Any thoughts on the issue?