Greg Morehead didn’t feel satisfied when he sampled online restaurant reviews — so he cooked up his own dish.
The dish is called “CT Best Restaurants,” a new online restaurant directory featuring customer reviews and background on New Haven and other establishments statewide.
It’s a dog-eat-dog, entrepreneur-eat-entreprenuer world out there, not just in the food biz, but in the online commerce world. Morehead, a former Dixwell alderman, a web design consultant by trade, and a competitor by nature, is jumping right in. With some financial backing from his father, a retired truck driver, he has designed the new QR (quick response barcode) based site, printed promotional brochures and table tents, and started reserving billboard space along I-91 and I-95. He has also retained 10 or so agents on commission to start fanning out to restaurants to sign them up for the site and purchase enhanced listings.
Any restaurant can sign up for free to have its address and web site listed in the directory. Also, Morehead’s crew will ask restaurants to place table tents that enable customers to scan a bar code into their smart phones and log instant reviews onto the web site. (Click on the play arrow above to watch Morehead walk through the process.) For a “premium” free the restaurants can have their menus listed along with biographical and other write-ups on their operations.
Over a lunch-hour chicken-cauliflower-tahini pita at the Sababa felafel joint on Whitney Avenue, Morehead, who’s 35, discussed how a professional R&B drummer and former ward politician (he represented Dixwell’s Ward 22 on the Board of Aldermen from 2009 through 2011) ended up taking on established national web-review giants like Yelp and Insider Pages.
He and his wife Shanah go out to eat often, he said. One night he was researching possible dinner spots when he was disappointed to find so few reviews and so little information about local options.
“Why can’t there be one place you can go” with information “in real time?” he recalled asking Shanah.
“Why do you start something like that?” she responded.
Morehead is always starting something. Infused with the serial entrepreneur’s non-stop energy, he is in the process of developing 15 inventions and obtaining patents, he said. He also makes money consulting on web design. He fits all that in usually at his Frances Hunter Drive home at night after his four sons go to bed, and when he’s not traveling to play R&B drumming gigs. (His most recent engagement: backing Brian McKnight and Case in Vegas.) He used to drive a Mobile Soul Food cart around town with his wife (when she wasn’t at her day job as a Yale registrar); then he found the operation took away too much time from the children.
So far his agents have signed up 82 restaurants to start the site going.
Customers who see the table tents at a restaurant can post their reviews right then to the site. Or they can do it from their phones or their computers later on.
They rate restaurants from a low of 1 to a top ranking of 5. Three-to-five-star reviews will appear on the site. One or two-star reviews will be forwarded to the restaurant owners to “follow up” on.
The Trust Factor
Paul Bass Photo
Does that skew the results? Morehead was asked. Negative reviews show up on sites like Yelp.
Those negative reviews are often bogus, he argued; he claimed he personally knows of instances in which a restaurant’s competitor filed a negative review on a website in order to draw business away. Positive reviews are suspect, too, he argued: You can tell that the same person often files a slew of reviews under the guise of different names.
CT Best Restaurants will attack those problems in two ways, Morehead said.
He said he will block repeated submissions for the same restaurant from the same IP address.
“You can’t just sit here and scan this 50,000 times,” he said, holding up his smart phone.
And owners will have to show they’ve followed up on negative feedback in order to remain listed as one of the state’s “best” restaurants, Morehead claimed.
“We only list the best restaurants,” he said, and those restaurants will have to maintain that status through that follow-up.
“This is discussed with all the restaurant owners that sign up,” he said. “A restaurant thrives on good reviews. This is a way to get good reviews from customers and a way to filter out bad reviews.”
Whatever their system, sites like Yelp have come under pressure from businesses to filter out negative reviews. Yelp has been more aggressive than some other sites in hunting fraud, according to Ad Age.
Conversely, some people have questioned whether web customer-review sites present truly independent grassroots reviews or tailor results to obtain advertising revenue—or can’t control nefarious campaigns to skew results. An entire industry has sprung up of companies paying people to file positive “reviews” on sites. Authors and their friends and relatives are notorious for jamming Amazon with supposedly disinterested raves. Most recently The New York Times reported on an effort by Michael Jackson fans to sink the fate of a new expose on their hero through online reviews; they had success.
As he contemplated his first bites of the chicken-and-cauliflower stuffed pita at Sababa, Morehead was asked what kind of electronic judgment he would pass if the shop were listed on CT Best Restaurants.
“I would put a good review in there for them,” he responded.
Taking on enormous sites like Yelp, Urban Spoon, and Zagat is going to be no easy task. Especially in a desire to stay CT-centric.
As someone who has written quite a few reviews for a competitor's site, I'm not sure what I have to gain by re-writing them for a site which won't even print my negative reviews and instead forward them to management, who could easily claim the problem has been solved?
It seems to me that the owner's past experience as a restaurant owner has made him more likely to trust the owners than customers, but the truth is, it's extremely difficult to effectively combat spam, malicious users, and also gave people an opportunity to express honest reviews.
Good luck with the site, however.