3 ms·
Duh, commuters are just less picky with their food choices, reliably fast service trumps food quality here for obvious reasons. Tourists as mentioned in the art
by mxfh 2y ago
Duh, commuters are just less picky with their food choices, reliably fast service trumps food quality here for obvious reasons. Tourists as mentioned in the article are not that many.
Anecdotally the worst McDonalds Burger I had was with a cold slice of cheese at the Berlin Main Station, while the Döner there was always above par.
- INTPenis 2y agoNot just commuters but tourists, people you can scam once and who will never be back. When your falafelshop is in the neighborhood you can't be scamming people because you'll quickly become abandoned.
- Rastonbury 2y agoI have a hypothesis that "popular" restaurants in tourist heavy cities like Paris, London, Tokyo have google reviews are heavily skewed by these tourists. Basically any place that has over 1-2k reviews and 4.5+ becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. Sometimes you go into a supposedly local place and everyone seated around you is American. I tend avoid places with thousands of reviews therefore or when there are barely any reviews in the local language
- macrael 2y agoOP found no correlation between railway proximity and quality
- mxfh 2y agoThe point is, that quality is not the metric here; the metric is google ratings. I would take a place with a solid 4.6 but hundreds of ratings over a low double digit 4.9 any time.
- hot_gril 2y agoI'm never going to look at ratings. The only use there is photos of menus, food, and the restaurant itself.
- forgotoldacc 2y agoI sort ratings by worst but look at the reason. If the 1 stars are "the waitress was rude", then that's fine. I'm there to eat. I don't need them to flatter me. If the 1 stars are "the food smelled foul and I saw them mixing leftover soup back into the pot", I know to avoid it. I've seen both of these types a lot. And I also do a quick sort by newest. If all the newest reviews are tourists, I know to steer clear. Tourists will give a convenience store egg sandwich 6 stars out of five. They'll write a full-on essay about the fine experience they had at a restaurant and saying it's obvious the chef put lots of care into the meal, not realizing it's a local chain restaurant that just pops things in the microwave. Then they'll take off 2 stars at a good place because the chef couldn't make them a gluten-free, rice-free, beef-free, soybean-free chicken burger (also, they have deadly poultry allergies so they can only eat chicken substitutes). I also see loads of these types of reviews.
- hot_gril 2y agoI've seen this too, a lot of 1-star reviews from customers who wanted some substitution and didn't get it. Seems designed to be abused by unreasonable customers, cause one of those equates to ~3 honest customers saying "meh" with a 3-star review. I'd prefer the restaurant that doesn't have to charge extra to absorb the costs of avoiding that.
- jval43 2y agoEven Google ratings are sometimes gamed nowadays. This wasn't always the case, they used to be reliable. Tripadvisor ratings on the other hand were always garbage. I recently had some really bad experiences with some fast food places in my corner of the world, at a train station as well. They all had 4.9 stars but lots of 1 star reviews matching my experience. But also tons and tons of eerily similar 5 star reviews with a generic photo of the counter (no faces, no food) and a random name and glowing review of who "served" them. Which is impossible at those places.
- decimalenough 2y agoDöner in Berlin is like ramen in Tokyo: the competition is so furious that objectively bad places go out of business quickly.
- mxfh 2y agoThere are a few that are obviously some sort of front business. It can't be the Döner.