Vinay Menon: A fake Montreal restaurant hit No. 1 on TripAdvisor. Will the internet ever stop eating our trust?

I hope you weren’t planning to dine at Le Nouveau Duluth.

When I typed that restaurant into Google on Thursday, the first hit was from TripAdvisor. The synopsis read: “See unbiased reviews of Le Nouveau Duluth, rated 5 of 5 on TripAdvisor and ranked #1 of 4636 restaurants in Montreal.”

That’s a boffo accomplishment. Montreal is a hotbed of hot spots. It’s a destination for snooty foodies. The problem? There is no way to snag a reservation at the No. 1 joint. You have a better chance of getting a Happy Meal from M3GAN.

As the CBC reported this week, Montreal’s top restaurant is a figment of imagination: “Le Nouveau Duluth does not exist but the ease with which it rose to the top of a travel advice site is a clear example of how easy it is to create buzz with no substance behind it — and what challenges real restaurants face getting noticed in the algorithm.”

These evil algorithms are ruining everything.

And, yet, we rely on them for consumer decisions.

I’ve never bought something on Amazon that had less than a four-star rating. I don’t necessarily read the reviews. I just trust that, in the aggregate, if 500 people say an iPhone charger exploded and scorched their eyebrows, I’ll try a different brand.

But I never wonder if that iPhone charger actually exists.

This is not the first time a rascal has fooled TripAdvisor. In 2017, British journalist Oobah Butler — even that name sounds fake! — fabricated the top bistro in London.

As he wrote in Vice: “And then, one day, sitting in the shed I live in, I had a revelation: within the current climate of misinformation, and society’s willingness to believe absolute bullsh-, maybe a fake restaurant is possible?”

He bought a burner phone. He built a website. He exploited the pretentiousness of fine cuisine with a menu of Moods: “Lust: Rabbit kidneys on toast seasoned with saffron and an oyster bisque. Served with a side of pomegranate souffle.”

To dodge the anti-spam filters and deceive the human moderators, he photographed his dishes. For this, he used sponges, shaving cream and toilet bleach pucks.

In one image, his bare foot sits on the plate under a fried egg that may or may not be a painted scouring pad. It was beyond ridiculous — and it worked.

The five-star reviews posted by Butler and his pals amped up the hype and moved “The Shed at Dulwich” up in the rankings. His burner phone burned with calls. Emails arrived from gastronomes eager to sample the “Empathetic” or the “Contemplation.”

Six months later? “The Shed at Dulwich” was No. 1 out of 18,092 London restaurants.

These pranks sound like isolated incidents, like gonzo hoaxes with no victims. But what if someone creates a fake restaurant and charges reservation hold fees for reservations that will never take place because there is no restaurant? How much business was lost by the Montreal restaurants pushed out of the Top 10 on TripAdvisor by this fake Le Nouveau Duluth?

A 2021 report suggested 30 per cent of all customer reviews were fraudulent.

Around the same time, the World Economic Forum calculated that, “fake online reviews influence $791 billion of e-commerce spending annually in the US, $6.4 billion in Japan, $5 billion in the UK, $2.3 billion in Canada and $900 million in Australia.”

That’s a lot of exploding iPhone chargers.

But it is restaurants that are hardest hit when the phoney detonates.

The late Johnny K, one of Toronto’s greatest restaurateurs, once confided his absolute disdain for online reviews. He told me there was no way to verify if a comment was legit. For all he knew, a one-star slag could have been catapulted into the ether by a jealous competitor. But then some people read it and decide to go elsewhere.

Then there is the flip side. As Butler wrote in Vice, restaurants once paid him to write five-star reviews on TripAdvisor for places he never even patronized.

It’s as if I were to grade and share my personal experiences with Tampax.

Maybe we need a Latin caveat emptor for dining: Eater beware.

There is no easy fix here because we gravitate toward the experiences of others, especially when it comes to hospitality and tourism. When my wife and I were in our early 20s, we decided to see as much of Europe as we could in about two months. We saved up for backpacks and train passes. I have fond memories of seeing her curled up in a grotty futon in a hostel as she dog-eared the pages in our travel bible.

“Let’s Go Europe,” as I recall, had an orange cover and was filled with helpful tips for staying, sightseeing and dining in the foreign cities we breezed through.

That book was the pre-internet equivalent of TripAdvisor.

But here’s the thing: we could have faith in the words. “Let’s Go Europe” didn’t lead us to search for a fictional pizzeria. It did not encourage us to visit an imaginary Winston Churchill Museum of Siren Suits and Frock Coats. There were no bots magically ripping out pages or revamping the rankings as we slept.

The advice was rooted in reality. All the listed hostels and restaurants existed.

Why is a fake restaurant in London or Montreal food for thought?

Because the internet is just getting started on devouring our trust.

SHARE: