How To Write A MenuPages Review

The recent spate of lawsuits against reviewers on a certain MenuPages competitor website that I will not name has given me a perfect opportunity to babble about the part of my job that is vetting user reviews.

Unlike many user-review sites, here at MenuPages every single review that goes up is held until it is manually given the okay by one of the members of our staff. We do this for a number of reasons — mostly, we don’t want the site to become a shillfest, with owners, friends of owners, and enemies of owners skewing the ratings away from whatever it is the restaurant deserves. But we also want to make sure that there’s nothing defamatory or potentially illegal in the content. That’s why you’ll never see it show up on the site if you repeatedly leave a review for your neighborhood taco joint that makes cracks about how your cats are missing (you know who you are) or how much you want to engage in adult behavior with the bartender (I’m looking at you).

Whenever you leave a review on MenuPages, you are agreeing to our Ratings and Reviews Policy. This isn’t as scary as it sounds, I promise. In a nutshell:

Keep it clean. We’ll delete or deny reviews that are racist, sexist, profane, or otherwise use language that’s inappropriate for a family website. Sometimes a review will be totally fine except for an errant F-word — in those cases, we’ll edit the review to keep the spirit but kill the cussing.

Keep it legal. No slander, no libel. We’re sad you got sick after eating at a certain restaurant, and from personal experience we really deeply empathize. But sorry, we can’t run a review that blames your puking on the chef, the kitchen, the slow delivery guy, or the servingware. Ditto for reviews that complain of bugs, vermin, hairs, or other undesirables. Take it up with the restaurant yourself — we’re a vehicle for opinions, not DOH red flags.

Keep it anonymous. Nine times out of ten a review containing a shoutout to “My fave bartender Alonzo!” is a shill from Alonzo himself, trying to show his employers how much he brings in the business. Similarly, the point of the review isn’t for you to rail on Kristen, your bitchy waitress. It’s for you to make a more general assessment of the restaurant’s prioritization of customer service. We’ll keep “waitress.” We’ll edit out “Kristen.” You’re welcome to sign your review using your own name, of course, but we’ll knock out any other identifying information like your blog’s URL.

Keep it unique. If you submit your review more than once, we’ll only run one of them. If you submit multiple reviews for the same restaurant in a short span of time, we’ll assume you own the place and we’ll delete all of them.

Keep it calm. My personal favorite part of the rules: “CONTENT SUBMITTED IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS WILL BE REMOVED.”

There are other criteria under which reviews are denied or edited, and we take them on a case-by-case basis. We try to be vigilant about shills — if you leave one, we’ll probably notice.

Most importantly: We’ll never deny a review that meets all our legal criteria but is critical of a restaurant we love, or vice versa. After all, we’re built on the notion that the opinions that matter are yours — we’re just here to facilitate that. So go forth, and eat dinner, and pass judgment on it!

How To Write A MenuPages Review