I was having a conversation with one of my co-workers today:
"Have you heard of the restaurant, Jellyfish?" She asked.
"No," I responded, "If it hasn't cracked the Yelp top 25 in any category, I probably haven't heard of it or tried it."
She laughed and responded, "You need to broaden your horizons!," and then continued to talk about how she heard the place had a great ambiance, etc. and how she was looking forward to going there with her girlfriends for a girl's night...
I was a little taken aback by her response and started to think about my current restaurant habits and my growing dependency on Yelp.
Yelp.com is a website that allows millions of users to rate their restaurant experiences and takes those ratings to rank restaurants in any given city. Nowadays, I often rely on Yelp to tell me where to go for dinner and, as I mentioned before, I tend to stick within the top 25 in any given restaurant category and rarely venture out of that range.
To me this makes sense. This is reasonable. If 500-something people gave a certain restaurant 4.5/5 stars, then that restaurant has to have good food right? So far I have not been disappointed. I've relied on Yelp numerous times and have gotten some pretty amazing restaurant experiences out of using the site.
But is this preventing me from tasting some really good food? I remember the days before Yelp when I used to just enter restaurants at random and order the same way. I remember going down streets around dinner time and entering the place that seemed the most crowded. I remember even giving very empty restaurants a chance, one time leading me to the best carne asada fries I've had in my life.
I probably won't quit Yelping anytime soon but it may not hurt to venture out again into the unknown and see where that takes me.
Image: http://skipsoldmyhome.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/47/2013/06/yelp-banner.png
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