What's your Yelp philosophy?

[stretchad]

This is not MMM related at all but I'm curious...
If you're using Yelp to find a restaurant, do you have a minimum threshold for # of stars a restaurant has to have? What about # of reviews? Or combination of both?

For me, the more stars the better, but I'll maybe give a restaurant a try if it has 3.5 stars, but just a handful of reviews... if a restaurant has TONS of reviews and still only 3.5 stars I'm less likely to try it...

[Deleted]

I have never looked at yelp.
I don't go out much. If it's a new place , it's off of a friends recommendation or with said friend.

[scribellesam]

I want at least 3.5 stars but prefer 4. I also skim through the reviews to see why people disliked it. Often, a person just had a bad experience with service for a large group, so if I'm going for date night I can discount that review.

[lulu21]

Yelp has never steered us wrong H and I always look at reviews. If the reviews aren't good, we normally pass on it.

[VillainV]

Not really, because I know a lot of people just love to bitch on Yelp, so it skews the ratings. I pay attention to recent reviews (in the last month) and look for trends...bad service? Slow food? More than one person with the some complaint in the last month will get my attention. I might still go though, depending on what the complaints are. And I'll admit to being a Yelp snob -- poorly worded reviews with misspellings and grammatical errors don't usually carry a ton of weight with me.

[Deleted]

I live in a land with tons of options so I generally pass on anything with less than 4 stars. Not just limited to restaurants.

[sent]

I typically don't read reviews until after I've visited a place to see if my experience matches up with others. I don't want to be influenced. I also hate how Yelp games small businesses so if I'm going to look for reviews, I'll look other places before I look at Yelp. Also, people are more likely to leave a review if they had a negative experience than a positive one so there's that.

[mcfelix]

I'm with @spunbutterfly. I use yelp as a guide to help me find spots, but not a be all, end all guide as far as ratings and reviews go. Plus I read an article recently about yelp's shady business practices, where they won't support companies that don't pay to advertise on yelp, so they won't post their good reviews, etc.