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Why chefs love to hate Yelp

Why chefs love to hate Yelp

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Having your livelihood dependent on the goodwill of a group of anonymous strangers is enough to give anyone a complex. In this piece for San Francisco Magazine, a group of chefs explain their broken relationship to Yelp and the legions of reviewers who control whether their businesses live or die. While Yelp can help people find new restaurants (or can help a city track food poisoning), chefs obsess over reviews and many wish the service didn't exist at all. "If two or three days go by and business sucks, I'll go, ‘Shit, I got a bad review on Yelp.'" says Jeff Mason, the owner of a sandwich shop in San Francisco. The anonymous system, the lack of control on fake reviews, and the difficulty engaging with reviewer has put restaurateurs in a codependent relationship with a service they both loathe and need. Read the full piece here.

'You’re in it whether you want to be or not, and that’s what’s so frustrating.'