Q:  In this morning’s newsletter, you wrote about going to the Top Chef Restaurant Wars dinner. Which restaurant did you attend: Carolina Queen or Tierra Reina? And whose dish did you order?
Kristen: I dined at Tierra Reina, and ordered the barbacoa made by chef Oscar Diaz. It was the right order! Not only was it beautifully presented with a stunning salsa duo at the bottom of the plate, the beef tongue and cheek were tender and flavorful, served wrapped in a collard green. It didn’t seem like the most popular order, but I found it to be the best on the menu.

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Q:  Can I really trust the reviews I see on Yelp or Google Reviews?
Tom: It’s getting tougher. While Yelp and Google do have software in place to filter huge volumes of spam, there has been an unfortunate trend of “review bombing” for the simple sake of maliciousness and worse, extortion reviews where a bad actor or actors manually enter or employ bots to give a restaurant a slew of no or one-star reviews, and then demand money from the restaurant to have them removed. This practice has been reported by The Washington Times, Restaurant Business Online, Axios, Bon Appétit, and others. There are some telltale signs: a slew of low reviews uploaded in a one or two-day span, a lot recent bad reviews posted by “users” with no prior review record, wording is negative but vague. In response, Google has introduced a dedicated “merchant extortion” reporting tool within its Google Business Profile for restaurants to report fake reviews and related extortion attempts while submitting supporting documentation. Yelp has recently updated its Trust & Safety report. When reading these reviews, be sure to look for specifics over a long period of time and check multiple platforms for consistency. Of course, you can always skip the online noise and head to our own UP Reviews.

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