How do you choose which restaurant to eat at when you go out?  If you’re sensible, you will read the reviews on this site, or perhaps consult a respected guide such as Hardens or the AA Restaurant Guide. 

Of course, the reviewers who write in these publications are only giving their own opinions, and you might disagree with them. 

But at least you can be reassured that they are expressed by people who know about food, and who have actually experienced the establishment in question.

I am constantly mystified as to why so many people instead turn to perhaps the most pernicious and unreliable collection of rubbish available online: TripAdvisor.

Sadly, this site has an undue influence on how people make the choice of where they eat out, something I can’t understand.  

Who knows what percentage of reviews on TripAdvisor are false: posted by restaurants themselves to boost their ratings; negative reviews posted by competitors; malicious reviews by people who failed to secure a table; or simply posts written by fantasists and attention-seekers. 

This week TripAdvisor has been caught out yet again. It listed an establishment called ‘Le Nouveau Duluth’ as its highest-rated restaurant in Montreal in Canada, beating 3,677 other listed places to the top-spot.

One breathless reviewer wrote of the place: ‘I can’t believe this place really exists’. Which turned out to be the most accurate comment on the site – because it doesn’t. Despite garnering no fewer than 85 five-star reviews on TripAdvisor, Le Nouveau Duluth is entirely fictional.

Amusingly, the fact that the restaurant’s listing included features such as ‘proximity to the beach’ (Montreal is 250 miles inland) didn’t arouse any suspicions in TripAdvisor’s minds.

This isn’t the first time that a prankster has shown up TripAdvisor’s tenuous grip on reality. Some years ago Londoner Oobah Butler (who, incidentally, claimed at the time that he made his living from posting fake positive reviews for £10 a go), created a make-believe restaurant in his back garden called ‘The Shed’, complete with slick website and exotic menu.

By getting all his friends to write fake reviews, the ‘restaurant’ was soon climbing the rankings. He then noticed an odd phenomenon: reviews started appearing from complete strangers, claiming to have eaten at the newest hot ticket in town (which of course they could not have done, given that it didn’t actually exist).

With the endorsement of TripAdvisor, Mr Butler started to get inundated with people trying to book a table, and before long, his ‘restaurant’ was ranked number one in London on the site.

We might laugh at such japes, but the truth is that the influence of TripAdvisor is now so great that it can make or break a restaurant, and the living of everybody who works there – often on the basis of reviews written by people who have never been near the place.

Pretty much every chef I have ever met has a tale to tell about diners who munch their way through a whole meal without a murmur, and then threaten to post a negative review on this nasty website unless they receive a discount. This is not restaurant reviewing – it is blackmail.

TripAdvisor is not some altruistic community, set up to give ordinary people a voice; it is a hard-nosed commercial business, whose global revenue in 2021, despite the pandemic, was getting on for a billion dollars.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with giving a voice to ordinary punters, and some review sites – mainly those which only allow you to post a comment when you have actually booked through them – are very useful sources of opinion.  

What this latest blow to its reputation shows is that TripAdvisor is not one of these credible sources of opinion, and just how easy it is to manipulate the site.

Next time you think about consulting TripAdvisor about where to eat out, my advice would be to take what it says with a massive pinch of salt.