Are restaurants and bloggers forming a sinister (if tacit) alliance in order to fool the dining public at large? Kinda, suggests the Wall Street Journal in a story on the new “review” paradigm created by sites such as Yelp and Chowhound.
Restaurants, says the Journal, are effectively buying positive coverage by handing out free meals that are not disclosed by the bloggers. The story digs up a representative handful of examples of online commentators quietly taking free food and raving about it, which makes for good, if not exactly shocking, reading.
Another, more novel, angle of the story is an exploration of restaurants actually (or by proxy) posting comments about themselves in the guise of diners. While not surprising (good review = customers = $$$) the WSJ piece digs down a layer further and finds a different kind of manipulation that is sometimes at work in a positive post.
Scott Rodrick, president of Rodrick Management Group, which owns and operates 20 restaurants on the East and West Coast, says that a couple of months ago he noticed several Yelp postings about how friendly the bar staff is at one of his restaurants. That struck him as suspicious: Only a short while before, he’d reprimanded the bartending team for being aloof to customers. ‘I’m sure it’s a case where they told their friends that ‘my boss sat me down,’ ’ Mr. Rodrick says.
Free food, it should be said, does taste different. When the hella pricey Fogo de Chao chain opened in Minneapolis, they comped me a meal so I’d blog it on a local pulse-of-the-city group blog. The food was good and my review said as much, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether I would have been so charmed had I personally been paying the bigass check.
For what it’s worth: I disclosed the free eats.
How is being comped a meal to blog about it any different from being paid to blog about it?
It seriously undermines your credibility, does it not?.
Nice article. It points out why the sometimes draconian and maddening rules on Chowhound make it one of the most reliable sites for restaurant info.
I was a fan of a lot of Bay Area bloggers who have their own sites until I started to learn about the free meals and relationships with restaurant owners who were ‘friends’.
It turned me off local blogs when one of the bloggers who makes the most noise about integrity was doing this. The blogger did protest too much about innocence and integrity.
The problem is the non disclosure. Fine, get free meals. Write about your friends … or people who want to make you their friends … but say that so the report can be evaluated in that light.
As far as not disclosing information on Yelp
- if a restaurant is a paid advertiser, ads are sorted in relevance by the number of stars … all the postive reviews are at the top
- Yelp advertises on Craigslist for paid reviewers especially when trying to establish themselves in a new area. The reviewer doesn’t disclose that and just seems like another poster.
One of eGullets faults is letting restaurant owners and staff participate and get involved in the discussions about their restaurants. At first I liked that but after a while I found myself being less honest about a place because I got to know and like the owners and didn’t want to knock them publically or respond.
All of this is bad for the restaurant too. Sure they can either dole out free meals or sweet talk people to get positive comments. However, in the long run people recognize a bad restaurant. Better to get honest opinions and make changes if necesary. The doors might stay open longer.
one thing to keep in mind. eGullet and Yelp are not food blogs.
I’ve been posting to Chowhound for nearly five years, and one of my hard and fast rules is that if a restaurant spams the baord, they are off my list for good. I don’t care how good they may be, they’re not getting any of my money.
There was some discussion of how we determine who to trust in this thread: http://www.chowhound.com/topics/443243
Well, neither is Chowhound. There’s a confusion out there- people (reporters especially) seem to lump all web media where people are posting opinions into the “blog” category. It’s semantics, but the issue is the same whether people are posting on their on personal weblog or if they’re posting in a public message board or a review site.
Restaurateurs are giving out these “blogger comps” not out of the kindness of their hearts, but in the hopes of getting a good writeup. You can bet that if a restaurateur is giving someone a comp, he/she is also making sure it’s a GOOD comp. People who are taking those comps simply have no way to tell how they are being manipulated, but those who assume they aren’t being manipulated are, at the best, naive and at the worst, willfully blind to the dynamics of the situation. Those who take these comps and write up a “wet kiss” for the restaurant, especially without disclosing the comp, are whoring their opinions and integrity. With disclosure, I think the opinion is still a bought opinion, but at least the reader is aware of it.
I think the WSJ is probably overstating the case about Chowhound, but I have definitely heard well-sourced rumors about certain independent bay area food bloggers who are known by the restaurants they visit and who get VIP treatment. It becomes bragging rights for the blogger and his friends, cheap PR for the restaurant, and a general disservice to the eating public who assume restaurants are fundamentally democratic.
The comped meals thing is twofold:
1st – the restaurant knows that you’re there to review them so they’re on their best behavoir, putting on the best possible show.
2nd – the food is free, and as you said James, free always tastes better.
But remember, big media restaurant critics don’t pay for their own food … their papers/magazines do. So it’s not like they’re exempt from that. Except that they’re “selling it” to the newspaper, and the newspaper shouldn’t care if it’s a positive or negative review. The anonymous food critic (whether a blogger or a paid newspaper employee) is in a far better position to size things up critically than the critic that the restaurant is aware of.
Free can make up for marginal food, but it’s never going to make up for terrible food and/or service. Really, what have I gotten for free if my meal is terrible? Why wouldn’t I write that bad review even if it was comped? It’s not like I’d want to go back there.
If a reviewer wants to accept comped meals, it needs to be disclosed and I suggest that they get a “gift certificate” from the PR folks at the restaurant. That way the servers & kitchen won’t know who it is until after the bill is finalized. (And of course still let the readers know this.)
I don’t mind if a piece about a restaurant is from the POV of a restaurant insider (that the writer is visiting their neighborhood joint where they know each other). I just want to know that’s what’s going on.
I am a food blogger who has been invited to, and accepted, free media dinners. Normally the people who attend these events include both web media (bloggers, Citysearch, Tablehopper, and the like) and print media (local papers and magazines). Although I am sure Bauer does not attend, I would imagine someone on his staff does in order to write up their non-review “new openings” sections. I know for a FACT that print media food critics/writers attend these functions. Some of them then revisit anonymously before penning a write-up, some do not.
So, this conversation should not be limited to bloggers.
That said, I ALWAYS disclose when I have eaten a meal for free in my write-up, and I NEVER promise a review — good, bad, or in between — in return for the meal. Sometimes I write them up and sometime I don’t.
I do always try to be fair, but I also wonder — how much is my review influenced? That’s something I don’t think you can ever really answer, but as long as you’re transparent and you try to be fair, that’s about the best you can do. Unless you are worth millions and can finance the publications you write for.
I don’t see why a food blogger shouldn’t have friends who are restaurant owners. It’s only if they take free meals from them and/or write false positive reviews on their blogs about their friends’ restaurants that the problem would occur. I totally agree with full disclosure and have always practiced that myself on my own blog.
I have friends that own restuarants and I feel the same way as rworange does about Egullet. It’s tough to be critical about people you like in a public arena, so my answer is to not write about them at all…any more. I just had a giggle looking back at some old posts about my friends restaurants that I did write when I first started my blog over 3 years ago and had no readership at all. It’s funny – without even realising it I noted that even back then when I didn’t really know what i was doing, I had still fully disclosed our relationship and then I went on to rip one of their dinners totally to shreds. Huh – some great friend I must be!
I am intrigued a little by SteveG’s comment about VIP treatment for bloggers though. The question is – how does a blogger actually know if they are getting such special treatment? It’s not like we are all Michael Bauers and are likely to be recognised. Probably I am naive but I operate under the assumption that nobody knows (or even cares) who I am.
I suspect that one of my favorite dining spots in town has somehow worked out my identity, probably because of a donation form I signed at a charity event they held. The fact they now recognize me (they don’t say anything, but I have heard they know who I am) certainly doesn’t rest easy with me. Last time I was there they comped our table a free dish. I’d like to think it was a gesture to make up for the 40 long minutes they’d kept us waiting in a cramped spot for the table we had reserved. But who knows if they would have done the same for someone else?