Yelp creates quite a dilemma. Generally speaking, it's a useful tool to find a restaurant when in an unfamiliar locale. In essence, this is a nice feature of any smart phone: "We need a quick easy restaurant with outdoor seating, margarita's, and quesadillas. Go find it!" The dilemma is all of the choices presented are reviewed by users who are clearly adept at posting things to Yelp, but may not be so adept at being taste-makers.
It's a demographic thing. Most people, I would think, that are posting things on Yelp are below the ages of 35. There may be a few people older than that, but statistically they're mute on the whole rating system algorithm. For the most part I'm convinced that no-one I know has parents that are posting on this. So the people who are essentially rating it, are rating it at with criteria that may or may not coincide with an older, more conservative person's attitude. Creating the conundrum of just how do you trust the ratings of a place when yelping? If you go with a higher rating, you may end up eating quesadillas at a glorified NYU bar: cheap, easy going, and totally fucking disgusting unless you have no money and are satisfied with junk food.
You could go by the low ratings, but somehow low ratings do not necessarily denote the inverse of the high ratings, that is, they are also sucky places. This has absolutely nothing to do with Paquitos by the way, which we found on Yelp while cruising through the East Village. Paquitos was, by no coincidence, a glorified bar, with awful service and canned guacamole (see patent pending guacamole rating system).
I suppose the solution is to start a new search engine, called snob. And only rate the restaurants that worth eating at to begin with. We'll see if that has any traction.
