LTHForum.com

I've spent quite a bit of time over at Yelp during the past week -- I'm interested in their model, which is different than ours and as I've said, of value. What I notice is that many of the restaurants discussed on Yelp tend to be higher-end places than the taco parlors many of us seem to frequent. I would never be so presumptuous as to suggest that there's "evolution" involved, and that Yelpers are at a lower stage in the process toward LTH, which I, of course, do not consider the crown of creation -- but it certainly proves of value to me.

If a thread -- or board -- is not to your liking, the very easy thing to do is to ignore it.

Hammond

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“We all have to stand before the kitchen gods.” Chef Jacob Sahaya Kumar Aruni

Agreed.

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Steve Z.
Photographer/Pseudojournalist

"The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook." - Julia Child

It reminds me of this that I once penned about a particularly bad Chinese Restaurant in Denver:


"What if you opened a Chinese restaurant and only loud, clueless white people came to eat there? Then, you would have the basic business plan for Imperial Chinese."

This came to me by way of a friend on FB. Some funny stuff, I thought.

http://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/

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"Strange how potent cheap music is."

FWIW: I don't think this [my link above] really belongs in this thread, as it's a parody and not actually about Yelp or Yelpers. But, it's a mods' call.

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"Strange how potent cheap music is."

regardless...It's funny....

T. G. I. Friday’s

Fresno, CA

Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM

Two stars.

Watts strode into the restaurant smelling of horse and woodsmoke and all the patrons turned to watch him as if he had called out to them but he had made no sound save the whispering of his leathers and the jangle of his spurs. He sat at the bar. A bartender in a vaudevillian striped shirt approached smiling like a grifter. Can I help you cowboy, he said.

Double rye.

I’m afraid we dont have rye.

Dont have rye.

Sorry.

Well what do you have?

The bartender slid a glossy menu toward the him. He regarded it with great suspicion. Held it at arms length. He sighed heavily.

I reckon I’ll have a Blue Razzberry Mojito Freezer.

Who is the douche here and did this really happen? From Yelp.......El Potosi on Elston. I cleaned up one of his words.




Carl B.
Chicago, IL

8/13/2011
From afar the quaintness of the building evokes images of a floral shop. I imagined I'd get closer and see a meg ryan-esque 30 something tending to a bag of fertilizer whose adorable mouth creates a throbbing haze of pleasantness in the air above. A type of forcefield that creates a haven overwhelming the grittiness of the surrounding buildings.

I went on a saturday afternoon with my roommate, he said he'd take me anywhere and that I could get ANYTHING I wanted. What a douche. So I walk in with the feeling of nachos on the tip of my urethra, and I see this woman behind the counter cutting meat using the cash register as a cutting board. She takes my order while continuing to butcher, wiping her brow and upper lip giving herself a meat mustache, and accidentally hands me a lump of cartilage instead of my change! The beef nachos were average fair, particularly for the price, however my roommate procured tacos and raved over the steak. This chick looked at me on the way out. Fuc.... whore.

I have no idea what that was about, aside from learning that enthusiastic butchering makes one a fucking whore. Hey, maybe I'll go to Paulina Meat Market tomorrow to see some sexy bitches in action!

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As a mattra-fact, Pie Face, you are beginning to look almost human. - Barbara Bennett

Suzy, I don't think this would happen at Paulina:

A situation that needs to be rectified, I say. You know your butcher is really "in the zone" when they can no longer distinguish between cartilage and small change.

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As a mattra-fact, Pie Face, you are beginning to look almost human. - Barbara Bennett

I find this paragraph to be so overwrought and insufferable, I'm tempted to enter it in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.


He probably should've asked his roommate to take him to see a urologist, because that sounds like a serious issue.

This combined with your "The Walking Chef: Texas" hunk may make you the funniest person posting on LTH.
I've now laughed out loud at two posts of your in just a few minutes.

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Check out my Blog. http://lessercuts.blogspot.com/
Newest blog: You paid how much?

You flatter me. With my ego now appropriately stroked, I'll take my delusions of comedy gold to Yelp, where I'll write tons of wiseass, needlessly cruel, wannabe-literary-sounding posts about unsuspecting businesses in order to build up as many Cool & Funny points as possible.

Seriously though, thanks for the kind words!

More Yelp shenanigans, this time from the other side:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/crime/9970 ... ritic.html

Jen

The saga continues on Chicagoist: http://chicagoist.com/2012/01/18/dont_buy_wine_from_a_guy_named_krun.php

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Cathy2

"You'll be remembered long after you're dead if you make good gravy, mashed potatoes and biscuits." -- Nathalie Dupree
Facebook, Twitter, Greater Midwest Foodways, Road Food 2012: Podcast

The Yelp problems exist in Minneapolis as well: http://shefzilla.com/?p=15679 - posted from Stewart Woodman's blog (one of the better chefs in Mpls.



Comments section is obviously negative about Yelp and its business tactics...

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"It's not that I'm on commission, it's just I've sifted through a lot of stuff and it's not worth filling up on the bland when the extraordinary is within equidistant tasting distance." - David Lebovitz

I think there is more to this story. First, it isn't a scathing review. She gave the place three-stars and, in context, a quite positive report. Maybe she edited it to make it more positive than it originally was. Plus, this review was the first one posted for the business.

Yes, you are right - the post was edited after the business owner inquired about it. Her review was the first one posted and as soon as it was, the owner claims to have received a call from a sales rep. In her words,



Agreed that I or we don't know the whole story but it does seem a bit fishy to me.

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"It's not that I'm on commission, it's just I've sifted through a lot of stuff and it's not worth filling up on the bland when the extraordinary is within equidistant tasting distance." - David Lebovitz

To see if Yelp plays favors with any restaurant for any reason, simply go to their filtered reviews, you will find that establishments with high stars that get low stars have the bad reviews removed to "filtered" section within few days making it inconvenient for people to see, the opposite is true for establishments that are not high on Yelps list, poor review are kept and good reviews are send to the basement.
Although Yelp has explanation for their filter system overall it doesn't make sense. Of course this is a little far fetched in someways, but actually it happens routinely.

Thinking about this thread, for years I used to read Yelp reviews. Mostly just for kicks to see what the bad reviews would say because some of them could be drop dead hilarious. A few times I relied on them. I'm also a memeber but I rarely if ever post. After a while though it seemed like most of the reviewers would have obnoxious complaints (I know, I know, they were probably always there) and then this scandal hit and it made you wonder about biases and whatnot. But I have to say when i discovered this site (which i had known about for a while) and started to read it much more regular Yelp has since been off my radar because people's tones and attitudes and likes and dislikes are far more intelligent and reasonable on LTH> I rarely ever even go on the site anymore, not even to laugh at the obnoxious reviewers with the petty gripes.

I don't think there's much if any disagreement that when it comes to Eating Out in Chicagoland, LTH versus Yelp is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

But what tools other than LTH do you travelling LTHers turn to when you go out of town? In the last few days, Sweet Baboo and I had to drive through Michigan, stay in Detroit, drive to and stay in Syracuse, drive down to Harrisburg, and drive home across Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana. I assure you that before we left home I spent many hours searching LTH for relavent threads pertaining to our routes and destinations. But road trip reports in the Beyond Chicagoland forum only go so far, and sometimes you want something different for your own road trip than following doggedly in someone else's footprints - especially if that someone else has different tastes than you do in terms of the types of places at which he likes to stop. I also check out my destinations on Roadfood and Chowhound before a trip, though I do not find them as easy to search as LTH.

One thing that can be said for sites such as Yelp and Trip Advisor is that when you're travelling somewhere unfamiliar where you know you've already found no suggestions on LTH (or Chowhound or Roadfood, for that matter), and you're looking at a tiny smart phone screen in the car, while your SO is giving you 5 minutes to find some place good to eat before he gives up and goes to Perkins, a site like Yelp or Trip Advisor is easier to read and can be useful perhaps moreso for the red flags than for the positive comments.

[Edited to move review of Dark Horse Tavern in Dewitt, NY to the Syracuse thread in Beyond Chicagoland.]

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"I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."

I found chow.com (FKA Chowhound) very useful for up-to-date info on both NYC and San Francisco, probably because both of those boards have been around and very active since Chowhound's inception. Augmented by eater.com (which has dedicated boards for both cities, as well as Chicago) and SFist/Gothamist, there is never a need to stoop to Yelp for either city.

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Food & Flowers: Andre Jordan's sweet doodle for a cold winter's day; diary of an unhappy restaurateur, circa 1881; winter project - try a terrarium

Katy,

That's a nice story but let me just say that if you posted it in a thread in the Beyond Chicago section in an appropriate thread and included the address of the restaurant, the information would be there for some future LTHer who might be visiting Syracuse. Putting the restaurant review here in a thread dedicated to bashing Yelp probably won't work as well.

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Steve Z.
Photographer/Pseudojournalist

"The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook." - Julia Child

i dont think checking yelp as a data point when travelling is a terrible idea, but i do always try to double check other sources.

I agree that this is the true usefulness of Yelp. Looking at Yelp on my desktop computer would be sheer idiocy; there are so many other more useful sources of information, like LTH. But I can't read LTH on my iPhone--at least not well, and not quickly. Yelp gets me within seconds to information and reviews about all kinds of businesses, including restaurants here in Chicago in neighborhoods with which I'm less familiar than my own, and it can tell me exactly how to find them. I used to hate Yelp, but that was before I got a smartphone. Now I use it with some frequency. I admire the ease with which the app works. (They clearly know what they're doing.) If I have to take the reviews with a boulder of salt, that's a drawback I can live with.

Good point, and I've moved the review to the Syracuse thread.

I find the wording "a thread dedicated to bashing Yelp" interesting. I came to praise Yelp - specifically for the scenario that I described in my post - not to bury it.

Katie

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"I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."

I is also interesting that in Yelp most positive reviews don't get responses (useful, funny, cool) yet negative or rude reviews receive responses from followers. it is as if people enjoy reading negative comments more than positive comments. It is a study in human nature with bad results. Unfortunately sites like Yelp have addictive quality, I mean what did people do before all the social media, even LTH, not eat out? No we ate out and most likely enjoyed our meal more than we do now and if we didn't we joked about it, not ran home and told the world what a miserable experience we had.

LTH can be viewed using the Tapatalk iphone/ipod touch app. Makes LTH very nice and smooth on those devices. Check it out:

http://www.tapatalk.com/

the freebie version is read-only but worth downloading to make sure you'd like it.

There's also another Android app called Convo whose free version I like, but I've been told the pay version is useless.

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What is patriotism, but the love of good things we ate in our childhood?
-- Lin Yutang