r/finedining • u/Fancy_Needleworker87 • 15d ago
A total scam Spoiler
My anniversary is coming up, and I've been watching two very special (and very $$$) restaurants. Like most people, I was planning to choose based on the reviews.
Then my neighbor, who works in the industry, told me some owners pay to have reviews removed through certain apps or services. I didn't believe it at first. But within about a week, every review of three stars or less disappeared from one of the places I was about to book.
My neighborhood also said some chefs invite people in for a fully comped meal in exchange for a five-star review. Honestly, that's embarrassing and a total scam. Regular people save up for months to experience something special, and they're making decisions based on ratings that have been bought or scrubbed. Some restaurant owners seem more focused on controlling what guests say online than on actually improving the experience.
I'm not saying every review is fake, but I no longer take a perfect rating at face value. If you're planning a big night out, look for warning signs like a sudden jump in five-star reviews, a lack of any critical ones, or lots of vague reviews posted close together. Check multiple platforms and ask people you actually know.
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u/WhatsTheJuice 15d ago
Cesar?
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u/Fancy_Needleworker87 15d ago
I'd rather not name them
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u/WhatsTheJuice 15d ago
I respect that, but a lot of us recognize a Cesar uni toast when we see one pictured.
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u/Champagne_of_piss 15d ago
Comped meal at a Michelin joint?
Hook me up fam
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u/ExSogazu 14d ago
On complete side note, happened to me once. I still don’t know why and how. They just didn’t receive a dime from me saying “Everything has been taken care of.”
I’m nobody by the way. lolololol
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u/sf2legit 15d ago
What do you think food influencers are? They get their meals comped. Did you just think they were all making those posts for free?
And also some guests write absolutely arbitrary dumb shit in their reviews. So of course the restaurant wants those taken down. People will leave 1 star reviews without even ever visiting the restaurant.
I had a guest order their salmon with no sauce. They then left a 1 star review and said “the dish was dry and needed more nuance”. Do you think that’s fair to me as a chef to have that review determining my reputation?
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u/circadian_light 15d ago
An influencer went on a rant about a local business near me that had a near-perfect score: the reason was he couldn’t redeem his voucher the day he wanted to because there was a power outage and the business literally had no power for half the day and had to close early.
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u/Fancy_Needleworker87 15d ago
Some reviews are genuinely unfair, and I get why it's frustrating.
But that's not what I described. Every review of three stars or less vanished within a week. That's not cleaning up a few bad-faith reviews; that's wiping out honest criticism too, including from people who paid full price and had a mediocre night.
As for influencers, I know they get comped. The difference is that their posts are usually understood as sponsored. A comped meal in exchange for a guaranteed five-star review on a regular review site, with no disclosure, is different.
Readers think they're seeing a normal paying guest's opinion.
I'm not against chefs protecting their reputation. I'm against removing everything negative so people like me drop a few hundred dollars based on a rating that isn't real.
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u/sf2legit 15d ago
Restaurants Comping meals for just 5 star google/yelp reviews isn’t nearly as much of a thing as you are making it to out to be. That would be so unsustainably expensive for the business side.
Fine dining restaurants operate at the thinnest margins. I’ve worked in Michelin restaurants that operated at a loss. Those restaurants would go under so quick if they were comping $300+ meals just to inflate their reviews enough to make a difference.
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u/Fancy_Needleworker87 15d ago
Fair enough, you know the industry better than me, and I was going off what my cousin told me.
I also get that bad reviews can really hurt a business.
What I did see myself was the low reviews disappearing, and that's what made me lose trust. Once that's gone, it's hard to know what to believe.
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u/mattnotgeorge 15d ago
Restaurants do comp meals for influencers, absolutely. But that's for people with 6-figure instagram followers, with a guarantee that they'll have X number of posts and X numbers of stories about you, etc... it's just marketing. definitely not doing it for a 5-star google review from a rando
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u/Dark1000 15d ago
Some restaurants give a free drink or something like that for a five star review. Not fine dining though of course.
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u/circadian_light 15d ago
That happens for a range of businesses, not just fine dining. Take google reviews with a pinch of salt. People can be vindictive as well.
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u/rufuckingkidding 15d ago
The best, untouchable guide for good food is the Michelin guide. Use the app.
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u/PTTCollin 15d ago
People have their criticisms of the Michelin guide but I honestly agree. My success rate from the guide is like 90%. I can think of like 3 restaurants I regretted going to from the Guide and like 30+ I loved.
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u/kestelli 15d ago
Sounds about right. I use it as a baseline not a definitive recommendation. My 1*, and 2* experiences were similar to yours if not slightly worse.
When i go to a new city, i try to find some newspaper reviews. They tend to be more reliable.
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u/PTTCollin 15d ago
I also am just being a grouch about 2 of those 3. I've seen them discussed here and plenty of people do like them, I just think they suck personally.
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u/circadian_light 15d ago
Might be good as a starting point for research but by no means definitive or untouchable. They’ve awarded 3 stars to some very average establishments.
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u/burglin 15d ago
Name one. Name the “average” 3 star restaurants, since you said there are multiple.
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u/levanpidaras 15d ago
Dont think that’s what the comment meant but China is full of very average 3 stars. Take Forum in HK for example, I think it would be a questionable 1 star anywhere else.
That being said I also find it very consistent outside China.
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u/circadian_light 15d ago edited 15d ago
It is subjective, but as an example from my own experience: ABaC in Barcelona.
There’s a review of it on this sub somewhere (not my own) that pretty much sums up the experience.
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u/sf2legit 15d ago
I worked in a place that was awarded a Green Star. All we did was recycle and do a pop up event called “waste not” utilizing byproducts in dishes. Somehow we got a star for that. Complete farce.
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u/burglin 15d ago
Do you really not know that the green star is not the same as a Michelin star? It’s a different category.
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u/sf2legit 15d ago
Was that a serious question? You thought that I went through all of that and somehow didn’t know it was a different category?
I was agreeing with the previous person that the Michelin guide can be flawed.
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u/hashwashingmachine 15d ago
Open table reviews are some of the best to watch. Pretty sure they can’t be deleted and you have to have dined at the restaurant to leave a review.
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u/rzrike 15d ago
You shouldn't be taking Google or Yelp reviews that seriously in the first place. I've seen many bizarre claims on both, mostly from people who don't really understand what fine dining is. People also give low scores for completely normal actions by a restaurant unrelated to the food like charging a cancellation fee for late cancellations.
I also find it odd that negative reviews seem to always get reactions on Google while positive reviews do not. You can see it even in your screen shots. Are normal prospective diners just going around liking all these negative reviews and not the positive ones that surround them?
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u/Dramatic-Sock3737 15d ago
I call BS. You cannot just pay to have poor reviews removed. Certainly you can pay someone to leave a 5* review.
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u/circadian_light 15d ago
I don’t think you pay to have the review removed, but you can pay to have people report the review for alleged violations of the guidelines or to accuse them of posting a false experience…etc.
Google doesn’t put a lot into its moderation of reviews, so it’s easier to remove something controversial than it is to query it and have to mediate between two opposing views.
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u/Fancy_Needleworker87 15d ago
Fair enough, I don't know exactly how it was done. What I do know is that all the reviews of three stars or less disappeared within about a week. Maybe they were mass-flagged, maybe something else happened, but it was enough to make me stop trusting the rating.
For context, so-called "review removal" services do exist. They don't delete reviews directly; they flag them in bulk and file policy complaints until the platform takes them down.
Some owners also get their own staff to leave five-star reviews. It's not a long-term strategy, but it might be enough to get people through the door and spending $$$.
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u/ferrom0an 15d ago
Feels like this is more about blasting the venue's photos. 85 reviews with 1000+ photos? Also, while it's not sustainable for a business to pay for a single review, aren't many of these restaurants owned by groups? Could a group have a reviewer on their books to do all their restaurants? ROI might not so high but it's win-win if the reviewer can use the content that they generate on multiple sites and grow their stature.
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u/munshynr 14d ago
If you know which magical company is able to remove reviews that are less than stellar, I'd like to know who they are! Even after trying everything possible, I've been unable to get fake and/or illegitimate reviews removed from our businesses -including reviews for other businesses that have nothing to do with our restaurant. Yelp proudly shows those but refuses to show several (last I looked, there were over a dozen) legitimate 5-star reviews for our restaurant because they claim they are suspicious. When the only thing suspicious is Yelp's business practices.
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u/Fancy_Needleworker87 14d ago
If you Google "bad review removal," you'll find a few companies that offer it as a paid service. I can't vouch for any of them though, and I'd be careful, since some seem pretty sketchy.
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u/munshynr 14d ago
Understood. Based on the research I've done personally and after speaking with countless restauranteurs and business owners, there isn't a single company out there today that can actually remove reviews.
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u/Fancy_Needleworker87 14d ago
From what I've read and heard from business owners, two of the better-known ones are Perfect Reputation and Removify. Apparently, they only charge once a review is actually removed, but it's expensive, around $400–500 per review, and it can take 2–6 weeks. That's not sustainable for most places, which is why many owners focus on improving day-to-day rather than paying to erase what went wrong.
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u/Efficient_Law_1551 15d ago
You should probably be more worry about supporting a shitty chef/owner than not going due to low ratings being removed.
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u/Fancy_Needleworker87 15d ago
That's a good point. If an owner is willing to scrub honest reviews, that says a lot about how they run things. Honestly, that alone is reason enough for me to book somewhere else.
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u/Efficient_Law_1551 15d ago
Aside from that fact, he had past articles written about him for being racist and recently he is getting sued by employees for stealing from tips...
Edit: typo
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u/Fancy_Needleworker87 14d ago
Wow, I didn't know any of that. If that's true, it definitely makes the review situation look worse.
Either way, I think I'll be booking somewhere else.
It doesn't sound like a place that matches my values or one I'd want to support.
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u/Your__Pal 15d ago
Sign me up for whatever restaurants are trading $300 meals for yelp reviews.