People have extraordinarily strong opinions on just about everything, and since 2004, Yelp — the site that aggregates user-written reviews — has provided a platform to exercise our first amendment right to criticize, exalt, and qualify. Yelp’s court of public opinion tends to unite itself on uncontroversial issues: The 405 highway in LA has a paltry 1-star review on average (which is understandable if you’ve driven on the 405). However, since Yelp’s launch, the problem of unhelpful reviews — like this one for a sushi restaurant complaining about raw fish — has been perennial, and Yelp’s powers-that-be want to ensure the information posted is being done both in earnest and by actual human beings.
In 2005, Yelp launched its Elite squad as a way to combat the phenomenon of low-quality reviews. “Elites are role-model Yelpers who embody the spirit of Yelp,” Andrea Rubin, Yelp’s senior vice president of community, said in a statement. “They’re eager to discover new businesses in their area and are passionate about sharing their discoveries with others.” In the process, Yelp essentially established a new class of Yelp reviewers (for better and some argue, worse) — but even among the Yelp Elites, there’s the big leagues: In December 2023, Yelp released, for the third time, its list of the Top 50 most prolific Yelp reviewers, the top five of whom submitted well over 1,000 reviews in a single year on everything from restaurants to parks to thoroughfares to Spectrum internet.
As part of Yelp’s 20th anniversary, I spoke to 2023’s second most prolific Yelp reviewer, Robert Siu, who splits his time between Providence, Rhode Island and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Siu, a self-described “discerning epicurean traveler,” has been an Elite Yelper since 2010. “To be an Elite, as a general rule, you have to be fairly active, which is maybe one or two reviews a month,” he says. He’s blown past that requirement handily. Last year, Siu estimates he wrote about 1,200 reviews — “that’s like four reviews a day” — for everything from Canada’s Border Service Agency (“Very quick and very efficient”) to Cafeteria Cavana in Spain (where he was attended to by a “very energetic and attentive server”).
Over the years, Siu has perfected his version of the ideal Yelp review, where brevity is paramount and anything can be deserving of feedback. The former industrial engineer has been nominated for a Yelpie, Yelp’s equivalent to a Pulitzer, and he won in 2022 and 2023. He, like any self-aware individual, doesn’t take himself or his reviews too seriously, but genuinely believes in the program as a way of encouraging honest criticism. Eater recently spoke with Siu to talk about what it’s like to write over a thousand reviews in a year.
Eater: How do you find and visit so many places? Do you have to get creative about where you’re reviewing beyond restaurants? You’re reviewing parks and roads…
Robert Siu: I check in whenever I can: the park, that store, a restaurant, an event, you know, anything. Basically, Yelp has said to all of us, as long as there’s an address, you can review it. I just came back from a month-and-change-long trip to Spain, so I probably [will log] over 140, 150 reviews out of my trip.
What are your criteria for reviewing a place, especially when you don’t spend that long there? If you’re not in a place for a while and it’s fine, do you just give it five stars and call it a day?
That is a good question because I look at my Yelp reviews in two different ways. One way is to write about a place that I really liked, the dishes I had, the service, etc. The other category that some of my reviews fall under are places that I think people would like to know about. For example, there might be places where I really enjoy myself, or it’s a restaurant that has not been on Yelp before and I might be the first one to review it. Then I add the address, I add the hours they are open and information about it, and then I write a review. So one [review style] is more my desire to share my experience, and the other is to try to be useful to the community and spread the word about a place or an experience that I’ve had.
Do you see the Yelp Elite community as a force for good?
If you see a reviewer that only has one, two, three, four, five reviews and they blast the place, I don’t even consider that a trustworthy review. I have a group of friends that I follow on Yelp, and most of them are Elites. They easily review 30, 40 places a year; they are active, and I kind of know what they like and don’t like. That way I know if the review is something that aligns to my likes and my dislikes.
Sometimes the business owners get a little upset about it and they don’t look at Yelp as a positive force or an objective force. But it’s really never been particularly objective.
It also sort of created a new category of food criticism. Now there’s a big community of people who are prolific and don’t necessarily write for a big publication.
Yeah. It just creates a wider area for people to be able to find sources of information. If people are big [users of] social media, they might look at Google reviews and Yelp; some people that are more old fashioned would still read a newspaper or, you know, look at a review from a trusted source from 30 years ago. It depends. People look and find information in different ways. So I think we complement each other.
What do you hope to get out of your Yelp Elite membership? Are you at the highest tier or is there a tier that you’d like to get to?
The initial Yelp Elite basically gets a red badge. After five years, you get a gold badge, after 10 years, you get a black badge, and I believe black badge is the highest level. I have a 13-year Elite black badge.
But I don’t do it for that. I just enjoy writing reviews, letting people know about experiences so they can make their own decisions about whether or not to go to a restaurant or a shop. But as a Yelp Elite, I love the camaraderie: We do stuff together and chit chat and a lot of times exchange information and ideas about places.
It actually is sort of a labor of love.
To leave over 1,200 reviews in a year is something different. For example, I see people that sometimes only write one sentence in their reviews: I think there’s a minimum, you have to have at least 50 or 60 words in your review for it to be valid. But sometimes I’ve seen people only write the minimum, like one sentence or two sentences.
I don’t know if you can actually describe an experience about a business or a restaurant with one or two sentences. Most of my reviews are at least two to four paragraphs. I try to be detailed and try to give some information … so people who read the reviews can get something out of it. Not just to have one notch under my belt of, I have one more review. My goal is really to try to share my experience with people so they can read it and then decide, Oh, that might be a good place that I want to check out.
That’s the thing that a lot of the most active Yelp Elites really want to do is to try to provide things that all people can use to their benefit; so they can make their own decision about going to a place or not.
Matthew Herskowitz is a journalist and documentary producer based in NYC.