I was cooking, fish of all things, in the Picasso restaurant at the Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas the day it opened. On my third interview the chef, Julian Serrano, said he would hire me but there was a catch, we were in San Francisco and he said that the job would be in Las Vegas. He just signed a 5 year $2M contract. Steve Wynn made clear the purpose of us being there, to make the list of Mobil's 5 star travel guide restaurants which there were only 25 or so at the time and none in Las Vegas -- it will still be years before the Michelin Guide came to the United States. The Mobil guide is now Forbes Travel Guide. It might have been AAA Five-Diamond Award but it's been a while and I forget which one is which. One of the requirements is linen napkins and the restaurant Serrano was at in San Francisco, Masa's, would have had them if they could find a laundry service to clean them. Steve Wynn was very serious about that restaurant. He hired Picasso's son, an interior designer, to design the dining room, he purchased $32M in Picasso artwork for the walls, and hired a Spanish chef. We imported whole turbot fish from Europe at $35/lbs that was only 60% usable, the bones and skin were tossed. It had nothing to do with Steve Wynn caring about food. He needed the prestige of five stars. It was something to aspire to. Why are these guides relevant? Because without the Michelin and Mobil travel guides, there is nothing to push these restaurants to aspire towards perfection whatever that is in a completely subjective art. The guides are the goal, the standard.

What is more interesting than this is why all attempts to create a fine dining restaurant in Las Vegas before the Bellagio opened failed.

Michelin's reviews have nearly always been in line with my own tastes. Yelp, not so much. A good portion of Yelp reviews are written by rubes who don't don't know what good food is, tightwads who prefer a low price over quality, and boors who don't understand why a restaurant won't tolerate their embarrassingly bad behavior - enough to significantly botch their accuracy.

Prestige, probably. Michelin stars are relevant as long as customers and reviewers are impressed by them.

Yelp reviews are uneven. Sometimes they are done by competent people paying attention, many times they are not. Crowdsourcing has its uses (I use Yelp for some things), but professional opinions definitely have their uses also.

Yelp ratings, at least in the bay area, seem to follow this approximate scale, which is frequently insufficient information to base decisions on:

* 5.0 stars: This restaurant will murder everyone you love unless you leave a 5 star review.

* 4.5 stars: The dining experience will probably give you an orgasm.

* 4.0 stars: The food here is not only excellent, but reasonably priced and the waitstaff are hot.

* 3.5 stars: The food is good, but either not quite good enough to justify the price and/or the waitstaff are ugly.

* 3.0 stars: An average, unremarkable establishment.

* 2.5 stars or below: Food frequently contains vermin and makes people sick.

As someone who is not an obsessed foodie but leans in that general direction, Yelp is better than throwing darts (especially if you read some reviews in addition to looking at the ratings) but it's not great. Zagat is still better although there's a lower barrier to reviews than there was.

Yelp is just more mass market and probably skews to more of a young nightlife crowd than I am part of. Given sufficient volume of reviews, I don't find Yelp to be bad but it's not ideal either.

Yelp suffers from the 4 stars problem. In my neighborhood Taco Time, the French Bakery, and a handful of upscale restaurants each average 4 stars on Yelp. So what does a 4 star rating even mean? It obviously has nothing to do with ambiance (Taco Time), or service (Taco Time and the French Bakery), or the food (Taco Time).

So what does 4 starts even mean? And what does it take to get more than 4 starts? Maybe star ratings are all about expectations. My current hypothesis is if customers get what they expect, they reward a restaurant with 4 stars. If the restaurant bests expectations, customers award 4 1/2 stars. This explains why a Taco Time taco nets 4 stars. Customers get what hey expect - a cheap, reasonably good tasting taco, whereas a market down the stream rakes in 4 1/2 stars for making really yummy tasting deli sandwiches.

Turns out that experience and careful thought does actually make you better at evaluating a good or service.

Anyone can write a review on yelp.

Taste. You can find great reviews online, but the quality of reviews varies drastically. Editorial filtering is very unfashionable these days but IMHO it's better for the majority of consumers, because of Sturgeon's law.

South Park actually had an episode on that recently..

"You're Not Yelping" (S19E04): Cartman considers himself the top online restaurant reviewer in South Park.