Yelp Reviews and Chinese food

Terence Lau

— 2 min read

It's not much of a secret about the differences between Yelp ratings and accurately trying to find the best Chinese restaurants.

Buzzfeed wrote an article about it

" Today, TikTok said that the best Chinese restaurants have 3.5 stars on Yelp, a theory fully explained by Freddie Wong, aka @rocketjump. His reasoning is that "cultural expectations for service" are different in the US compared to Asia, resulting in Chinese restaurants receiving lower ratings for their "bad service," that's balanced out by the higher ratings for their good food, landing them precisely at 3.5."

Ali Wong talks about it with Dave Chang on Ugly Delicious

I was visiting my parents in a Bay Area suburb last weekend, when they suggested a just opened dim sum place in a nearby strip mall. I don't know if I can accurately give it a restaurant rating after just one meal, but the menu was so so interesting.

In addition to the traditional HK/Guangzhou dim sum menu items, they featured some of these regional Cantonese items that in my decades of eating Cantonese food that I've never seen in Cantonese centers of cuisine like Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Vancouver, or Lima (yes Lima!)

The taro and chinese sausage dumplings were wrapped in rice wrappers, something Christopher St. Cavish has mentioned is a Taishan speciality. Regardless it was full of very regional Cantonese specialties and at least in our first meal there, we had a very high hit rate of food - the basic dishes were good to very good and I'm still thinking about the taro & Chinese sausage dumplings a couple of days later.

I was updating some of the information on a wayfinding app on my phone and searched the restaurant on Yelp to confirm the exact address and opening hours and the rating was 3.0 with multiple 1.0 ratings. Surprise of surprises, the low ratings complained about being ignored by wait staff and being charged for tea/sitting fees.

So yes, I find Yelp almost useless as a determination factor into if a restaurant is actually good or not.

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