Yelp.com

This week, I was on a panel at the International Association of Culinary Professionals conference in San Francisco. The panel was about restaurant criticism in the age of Yelp, and one of my fellow panelists was Morgan Remmers, Yelp's Manager of Local Business Outreach. The issue of how restaurateurs can raise their ranking came up, and Remmers offered some advice on how to get that star rating up.

It's no wonder businesses would want to raise their star ranking, even just a little. Last year, research out of UC Berkeley showed that a half-star increase in a Yelp rating led to a 19 percent increase in bookings. Prior to that, a study from Harvard Business School found that a one-star increase in a business's Yelp rating increased revenue 9 percent. So getting that star rating up, even a little, makes a big financial impact.

As a critic, my main advice for getting that rating up is simple: Don't suck. But Remmers has some other advice, which she was kind enough to share with us:

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Via Facebook

The ReviewerCard

A story in the L.A. Times yesterday profiled Brad Newman, a guy who writes a lot of online reviews and decided to figure out how to leverage that fact. He's invented The Reviewer Card, a $100 piece of plastic that you show to restaurant and hotel personnel to let them know you write online reviews, in the hopes your service will improve. From the universally disgusted reaction, it seems as though you might be more likely to receive spit in your dinner.

Eater wrote about the card, with the headline "ReviewerCard Takes Extorting Restaurants to a New Level." On Twitter, food writers and chefs had their say:

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Screenshot of Yelp.com

Yelpy Insights

Thirtysomething vegetarian looking for restaurants that other thirtysomething vegetarians also enjoy? Now, there's a Yelp! for that: The site recently rolled out two new filters called "Yelpy Insights," which narrows search results based on eateries "liked by vegetarians," as well as those liked by users in their 20s, 30s or 40s.

As Yelp's Official Blog explains, the filters were created based on feedback from vegetarian Yelpers who wanted a better way to search for vegetarian-friendly eateries. While the site does have "vegetarian" and "vegan" categories, they're often under-inclusive, omitting vegetarian-friendly restaurants that aren't categorized as such. A general search for the word "vegetarian," though, is over-inclusive (Yelp's example of a typical unhelpful review: "I'm so glad I'm not vegetarian, the bacon-wrapped filet mignon was great.") To find the happy medium, Yelp analyzed its database of reviews to identify certain patterns. As an engineer explains on Yelp's Product & Engineering Blog, "By combing through our vast review data, we're able to pick out folks who share a vegetarian perspective in their reviews and highlight the businesses that they like."

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Yelping with Cormac

At its best, Yelp help can help you find a lunch that won't ruin your day.  At its worse, the website is, if not a petri dish for extortion, a willful enabler of bad, whiney writers.  The first big problem is, according to a judge, no longer up for debate, but the second begs for a solution.  That's where Cormac McCarthy comes in.  

No, the reclusive 78-year-old author of Blood Meridian and The Road has not abandoned grand Western mythologies and apocalyptic visions and turned his typewriter toward the crafting of spare, grim Yelp reviews of restaurants, groceries, and clothing stores. Instead, using only slightly more punctuation than the real McCarthy probably would prefer, San Franciscan EDW Lynch has attempted to channel the writer on his newish blog Yelping With Cormac.  

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Guzzle & Nosh

Zagat: still doing it backwards.

Long before Yelp and other online restaurant sites were all still twinkles in computer programmers' eyes, Zagat was using the power of the hive-mind to create definitive restaurant guides that were local, social and portable. That's all over.

When it came to migrating the brand to the web, founders Nina and Tim Zagat cut themselves off at the knees by placing most of their content behind an expensive paywall. Faster than a xiao long bao slipping through greasy chopsticks, market share plummeted. Nielsen estimates that in September Zagat.com had 570,000 unique domestic web visitors compared to 9.4 million for Yelp.

Fast-forward to 2010: Zagat.com remains stuck in paywall purgatory, without the eminence of the Michelin guides or the populist appeal of free sites like Citysearch or "the site that rhymes with kelp."

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Courtesy of Westword.

When our Denver cousin Cafe Society ran an interview with chef Scott Parker of Table 6, they talked about all sorts of interesting things: kohlrabi, deep-fried organic rosebuds, alleged salt allergies. But all anyone cares about are Parker's comments pertaining to a certain website that rhymes with kelp.

When asked what he'd like to see less of in Denver from a culinary standpoint, the 37-year-old former heavy metal musician from Arkansas opened a can of verbal whup-ass on the online reviewing juggernaut:

Amateur instant online restaurant critics -- specifically those who write reviews for a website that rhymes with "kelp." Think about it: They review a McDonald's and then turn around and review Mizuna. I just imagine bored, jobless layabouts with not many friends who are convinced that they're going to have a bad time before they even step through the door of a joint. The kicker is, you can't respond to these inbreds and try to educate, or at least explain, why some things happen the way they happen. Have a little fun, for chrissakes. Loosen up when you go out, and let me be the stress ball in the kitchen busting my ass for twelve-plus hours trying to make you the best food I can. Fuck you!

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"The aroma of pungent garlic coming from this restaurant caught my attention recently. My first sign of trouble here, however, came when asking for a to go menu last week. The girl working the counter was anything but friendly when handing one over and answering questions. Today, we arrived at the restaurant at 11AM and were kept waiting until the same rude young lady showed up. I joked that she was late, she insisted they were not (cook was opening gate), and asked us to wait a few more minutes for them to set up. No apology, no explanation. I wish I could tell you whether the food here is good or not, but we did not even get that far. My advice to the owners is to hire new staff immediately."

Stop Yelping. We're going to put it on a t-shirt. We advise the reviewer quoted above to also stop eating out. Because some early bird making feeble jokes about her perceived tardiness is exactly what "the girl working the counter" at a tiny, family-owned joint should have to hear as she begins her 12-hour workday. A classic example of....

5. The Yelper who expects a red carpet.

Read on for four more annoying Yelpers.

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kaszeta/Flickr

Are lawyers in the class-action suit against Yelp smelling victory?

Yesterday, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman announced the user review giant would drop the "Favorite Review" feature and let readers see the reviews that would otherwise have been filtered out by its automated review filter. "Now you can take a look at any business listing on Yelp and see for yourself the work the review filter has done behind the scenes," Stoppelman wrote on the Yelp blog. "Perhaps helping to protect one business from malicious reviews that might stem from a competitor."

Today, TechCrunch notes that, in a press release, the Miami and San Diego law firms who filed the class-action suit against S.F.-based Yelp called Stoppelman's announcement a "first step in the right direction." So Yelp's legal worries might soon be over, right? Not so fast, warns TechCrunch.

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