This piece is not about food and restaurants and eating out. Well, it is, but not about a specific place. Instead, it's a bit of a rant against the paucity of places to read decent, crowd-sourced reviews. The sort of review that tells you a little about the place and the appearance, but isn't forced into the breezing positive style that food magazines go. The sort of reviews that can give you a warts-and-all idea. 'The steak is excellent, but the potatoes were undercooked' reviews.
There was one such place. Urbanspoon. It had a very simple voting system, a comprehensive list of the restaurants in a city, and was relatively easy to search. It also allowed you to list the restaurants in order. You wanted to find what had been voted the best breakfast place in Victoria, that was open on a Sunday morning at 10 am... the 'spoon would do it for you.
For voting, you gave a thumbs up or down. Or nothing... if you had no strong opinions. The rating was the percentage of thumbs up to total votes. Anything over 85% was worth visiting, as long as it had a couple of dozen votes.
Then, sometime this year, they got brought by Zomato. I had never heard of Zomato, but they appeared to have a large network in other countries. They replaced Urbanspoon's website with their own, and re-did the ratings with a 5 point scale. But they still took the Urbanspoon +/- as a base for their data. Which just leads to to odd results, for starters.
They also managed to have 'City of Victoria' and 'Downtown Victoria'. I have no idea of the difference between the two, and restaurants would be arbitrarily attached to one of the other. Saanich is a separate place. As is Oak Bay. So when searching for places to eat in Victoria, it'll not find things just over the municipal borders. Nor can you filter and re-order your search by rating. Instead it defaults to popularity. Which is a stupid first order for a restaurant. I don't care if it's popular. Cora's is popular. It doesn't mean it's -good-. Zomato acknowledge this is a bug, but it's not fixed. I have no idea what sort of system can't have a simple 'order by' feature fixed in a few days. Not weeks and months.
But worst still, I noticed a rapid drop off on participation. New restaurants aren't getting voted on or added with anything like the speed Urbanspoon did. It was rare that I'd be the first to add a new location on Urbanspoon. On Zomato, some places were open for months before they got a listing. So the data becomes out of data, and the frequency of new info has slowed down, making it less valuable, so it's less likely people post. A vicious cycle.
So, I've deleted my account, and I'm removing my 125+ reviews. I don't want my content shared on such a terrible site. It drives little traffic to me, and provides little value to it's users.
But looking around, there's not much better. Yelp is decent, but suffers from paid listings and the inability to link between the blog and the entry. Blogger's have egos. Okay, I have an ego. I like people to read my stuff... and in return, I'm happy to have people read other content on the site. Yelp also have form for charging companies for better reviews, which is kinda of defeats the trust you can out in the site.
Trip Advisor has, in general, good comprehensive reviews. However, they tend to be from tourists and visitors, so finding people to trust and follow is hard. Trip Advisor also appears to be far more likely to suffer from vandalism reviews, where people have axes to grind. For hotels and attractions, I find it great. For food, it's just okay.
After that, there's the Google Local pages for places, Facebook pages for individual restaurants, and... not much else. There seems to me to be a big gap in the market for an honest, easily to use review site for food.
Localfork.com anyone?
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