{"id":463798,"date":"2026-10-12T15:28:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T15:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/463798\/"},"modified":"2026-10-12T15:28:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T15:28:08","slug":"are-online-restaurant-reviews-broken-why-dallas-diners-cant-trust-star-ratings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/463798\/","title":{"rendered":"Are online restaurant reviews broken? Why Dallas diners can\u2019t trust star ratings"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tOnline restaurant reviews can be helpful, or misleading. \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Adobe Stock<\/p>\n

Something to ponder the next time you\u2019re deciding whether to order from a new restaurant and looking to online reviews for help.<\/p>\n

An East Dallas McDonald\u2019s, hardly anyone\u2019s idea of haute cuisine, has a 4.5 rating out of 5 on Uber Eats. That\u2019s higher than the site\u2019s ratings for Smokey Joe\u2019s BBQ, which is on the Observer\u2019s list of the area\u2019s top 50 restaurants.<\/a><\/p>\n

An exception? Hardly. Look at online ratings and reviews, including the three major delivery services and Yelp, and you see that contradictions like this abound. The Einstein Bros. Bagels in a strip center on Mockingbird Lane, again, not likely to be confused with a neighborhood bagel shop in Brooklyn, scores 2.6 on Yelp but 4.6 on Grubhub.<\/p>\n

In other words, as SMU\u2019s Venky Shankar, PhD, chair of the Cox School of Business marketing department, reminded me recently, online reviews aren\u2019t worth much, never have been, and probably won\u2019t ever be. That\u2019s because they\u2019re not necessarily there to help diners find a good place to eat, but to sell product. That\u2019s the point of Amazon\u2019s years-long battle against fake reviews<\/a>, which has included lawsuits against \u2013 believe it or not \u2013 what the company calls \u201cfake review brokers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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CLOSE\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, advances in AI technology, which allow what seems to be actual writing from real people instead of machine gobbledygook, have made it even harder to spot traditional fake reviews, like those with five stars but a one-line comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The wisdom of the crowd was supposed to save us from this. The theory<\/a> assumes a large group is smarter than its smartest individual, so its conclusions are more valid. In other words, 100 people reviewing a restaurant would offer a \u201cbetter\u201d assessment than a single professional reviewer. The Internet, with its potential for millions of reviews on the same subject, was supposed to show the wisdom of the crowd at its finest.<\/p>\n

Which, given a 4.5 rating for a McDonald\u2019s, really hasn\u2019t happened. <\/p>\n

So how can you use online restaurant reviews, allowing for all of this? Keep these guidelines in mind:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Dates. The third-party delivery services are notorious for showcasing positive reviews, even if they\u2019re two or three years old (see the 2024 review for the NorthPark-area Norma\u2019s on DoorDash). That\u2019s bad enough, but in this restaurant environment, where operators are cutting costs and quality is suffering<\/a>, older reviews are even less accurate. So go past the front page to check out the more recent reviews.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Number of reviews. More is better, even with the wisdom-of-the-crowd fallacy, says Shankar. A handful of glowing reviews, or even negative ones, won\u2019t be as representative as hundreds.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Perspective. What\u2019s the reviewer looking for? If all they want is coffee and a biscuit and a seat at McDonald\u2019s to kill a morning, a 4.5 isn\u2019t out of the question. But someone who gives a high rating for a sodium-laced, oddly sweet Quarter Pounder with Cheese probably has different standards than those of us who want something a little less chain-like. So their rating can be discounted. Yelp reviews can take perspective to extremes, with ratings downgraded because of \u201csurly\u201d employees, changed opening hours, or restaurant policies that annoy the reviewer, none of which have anything to do with the quality of the food.<\/p>\n

Because, in the end, if you like the food, what anyone else thinks doesn\u2019t really matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Online restaurant reviews can be helpful, or misleading. Adobe Stock Something to ponder the next time you\u2019re deciding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,106000],"class_list":["post-463798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}