Newspaper View of Web Restaurant Reviews

While the San Francisco Chronicle article on food bloggers affecting restaurants with "amateur" reviews does feature our own Sam, the rest of the article kind of gets my dander up -- take a look at it here. It makes no distinction to posters on something like Yelp vs. food bloggers who work hard to be responsible and responsive in their write ups.

I will say that the changing scrunity restaurants are getting is probably a good thing. Maybe being concerned about possibly smarmy posts or looking for trends in the comments (one example is a restaurant owner who increased portion sizes after he saw it was a big issue with reviewers) will help food businesses bring their A game to the table all the time. On the other hand, I personally have a healthy skepticism about non-food blog restaurant comments and posts on Citysearch, Yelp, etc. I read them but don't rely on them. So often they are unreliable as to the larger experience to be had.