THE BEST NON-EXISTENT RESTAURANT OF LONDON

TENZIN TIMES

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January 24 2004

THE BEST NON-EXISTENT RESTAURANT OF LONDON

Imagine one second, it’s you want to treat yourself to a good restaurant the 1st time in a very long time, so you reserve 1 month in advance the top-rated gastronomic restaurant in London. But the d-day you end up in the backyard of a man’s house eating frozen food prepared in the microwave.

In London, the journalist Oobah Butler turned his shed into a gourmet, appointment only restaurant. He tricked people thanks to the rating site Tripadvisor. Tripadvisor, if you didn’t know is a website on which consumers can write a review or rate on a scale of 1 to 5 a service or a product.

Oobah Butler used to write fake reviews on Tripadvisor for restaurants and other services, and that’s where the idea of faking a whole restaurant came to him. He disclosed to us “I had a revelation: within the current climate of misinformation and society’s willingness to believe absolute, maybe a fake restaurant is possible”. With that idea he started by creating a fake website for his fake restaurant and named it the Shed at Dulwich. The menu was quite untypical, as it was based on the customer's mood made by the chef, but with obviously with fake pictures as those dishes did exist only in Oobah’s mind. But he did not mention any address to put a kind of mystery and secret to the restaurant. He then made a page for his shed on Tripadvisor and put fake reviews with his friends and fake food picture. In less than 6 months the restaurant became the best rated restaurant in London on the rating site. He opened the so called restaurant for only one night and had some customers sit at his shed and eat his frozen meals.

The goal of this trick or if you want experiment, is to show that you should always be careful of online reviews and have in mind that it can all be faked. Online reviews should always be an information to be taken quite lightly and not as something official and verified.

Written and edited by Tenzin Dekyong

www.tenzintimes.org

Nb:The date is just my birthday since I didn’t know what to use as date.

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