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Anthony Bourdain is the man. I think that’s something we can all agree on. The celebrity chef has made a career out of traveling, cooking, writing, and meeting interesting people. We should all be so lucky.
In a sitdown with Business Insider, Anthony Bourdain and Danny Bowien of Mission Chinese were asked about Yelp! reviews and reviewers. Tony didn’t hold back. He unleashed his disdain for the faceless commenters and reviewers of the world. Trashing the ‘elite Yelp users’ for destroying the hard work of chefs and employees who spend a year getting a restaurant ready to open only to see all of that hard work unraveled in an instant.
‘Find a chef who has anything nice to say about Yelpers, it’s a contradiction’…Is it? Are there really no chefs at all who enjoy seeing constructive criticism roll in? I have to imagine that the disdain and/or love of Yelp is a sliding scale that changes as the stakes increase. If this is a restaurant in TriBeCa which took 7-figure infusions of cash to get off the ground I imagine you’re going to want to track down every shitty Yelp! reviewer because the stakes are so high. But I doubt this is going to be the case in a small town where good reviews can have just as much meaningful impact as bad ones.
I was considering whether or not to mention this because the restaurant actually made good and refunded me and the two dudes I was dining with for the meal. But, after receiving 3 more bills for hospitalization over the past year totaling around $1500 for my trip to the emergency room after throwing up blood with food poisoning, I’d just like to say that the restaurant I mentioned in the first sentence of the second paragraph above is still on my shit list. It’s a family-style restaurant, and last December I got food poisoning there along with the two other dudes I was eating with. I was the only one hospitalized and even with great health insurance, I kept receiving ridiculous bills in the mail from the hospital. Mission Chinese refunded our meal, which was nice of them, but I’d have much preferred to not be hospitalized for throwing up blood. They offered to host me at the restaurant again but I can’t really see myself ever eating at a place that caused me and 2 friends to get so sick. They also asked me to delete my disparaging tweets about the experience, which I was sending from the E.R., after they refunded the meal. I did, and I regret doing so now…Think I should put this in a Yelp! review?