Every time I leave a restaurant, I wonder who else I think could share the experience and enjoy it. I've never ascribed to the notion that meals or restaurants can be statically analyzed and locked into a certain point on a good-bad sliding scale. The rush to summary judgment tends to color most Yelp reviews I read, rendering them unhelpful and unrelatable to me. Part of the problem may be word choice and messaging on these social media platforms.
Yelp users have to be proactive to understand how reviews can be more helpful.
When you click "Start your review" on a restaurant in Yelp, you'll be taken to the view above. Note the minimal guidelines displayed to the user. The first sentence's intention seems to be empowerment of the user and their words, while the second sentence implies a high worry or concentration of fake reviews. It's still not clear what makes a good "Yelp" review yet. The "Read our review guidelines" link fleshes things out a little, but it's only once you expand the "Review Guidelines" section that a person is given a picture of the "best" kind of reviews. I don't know why they bury these guidelines so deep. It seems clear most Yelpers haven't read the guidelines or actively ignore them.
This is the kind of content that should be on the first view for reviewing.
Food critics like Michael Bauer usually visit a restaurant multiple times to get as many perspectives on a restaurant before rendering judgment. This review of Dumpling Time for instance, dings their soup dumplings for being a little too sticky across "visits", plural. A seasoned food critic reporting that detail means a lot more to me than this Yelp review calling out the gyoza dough with "It was very sticky and strange." I wish Yelp would adhere to their own guidelines and rename the section "Experiences" rather than "Reviews".
Not knowing the person, I look at every yelp review with a critical eye and zero assumptions about their justifications. Do you live in the area? Did you go out of your way to visit with inflated expectations because of another friend? Were you already starving before they took your name for the wait list? Was the parking experience so painful as to torpedo the visit? The only clarity I can get comes from clear communication about what the person was expecting, and what they experienced in the end. If a pizza place gets a 1-star review for not offering gluten free pizza, I can completely ignore that review in deciding to visit: I'm not gluten free and it wouldn't impact my enjoyment.
There's a time and a place for everything. If I can't pull out the context of their assumptions and variables that informed their decision-making can I understand how I might enjoy the restaurant. Yelp users are not Caesar, rendering life and death punishments with a thumb. Tell me what it was like for you, and I'll try to guess how I'd enjoy it.