The world has a new god, and it isn’t crypto, or Christianity (although apparently bibles are selling again).
It’s reviews. Again. We trust them more than we trust our friends, our families, or our own taste buds. Want dinner? Don’t dare walk into a restaurant until you’ve consulted the sacred gospel of Google stars. Planning a vacation? Better cross-reference Booking.com with TripAdvisor and Yelp, then scroll deep into the one-star reviews to find out that a guest in 2016 thought the breakfast croissant was “a bit dry.”
Forget the new Pope’s sought after blessing — five stars is the modern benediction.
Americans are the worst offenders. They’ll check Yelp before choosing toothpaste. A plumber with 4.9 stars is basically a demigod. The irony is half those reviews are written by people who couldn’t install a lightbulb if their life depended on it. Yet here we are, treating “Dave K.” and his burrito wisdom like it’s the Magna Carta.
Europe pretends to be more sophisticated about it, of course. The French will sniff, “We do not care about such things,” then secretly Google reviews before sitting down for lunch. Italians love to claim they follow instinct and tradition, but ask any tourist in Rome where they ate, and you’ll find it was the #3 ranking trattoria on TripAdvisor, sandwiched neatly between the Vatican tours and the Colosseum skip-the-line tickets.
The Michelin Guide is often held up as the gold standard, but let’s be honest: a star doesn’t always mean transcendent cuisine. Sometimes it just means the chef stacked some asparagus in an appealing geometry and charged you €300 for the privilege. And I have been to plenty of Michelin star restaurants that I can promise you do not deserve that star –- it’s not about naming names but for fuck sakes. Humanity may not be worth saving, but at least dinner is photogenic.
In Eastern Europe, reviews exist but with suspicion. In Poland or Romania, people tend to assume half the reviews are fake, which is often correct. They’ll nod politely while you gush about your “hidden gem” on Google Maps, then take you to their cousin’s neighbor’s restaurant instead. Spoiler: the cousin’s neighbor cooks better. Of course, the real irony is that if aliens were to land tomorrow, our cultural legacy would be these contradictory star ratings: a war-torn city and a kebab place both sitting at 4.5. Explain!
In Asia, though, reviews are practically law. In China, no one dares order noodles without first checking Dianping or Meituan to confirm that thousands of strangers enjoyed slurping there. In Japan, reviews are important too, but there’s a certain reverence for curated voices — TV food shows, magazines, celebrity chefs. When someone famous says go, people go. In Korea, it’s all about Naver, Kakao, and hyper-trendy Instagrammy photos. It’s not about whether the food tastes good; it’s about whether it will look good on your feed. Entire cuisines are now designed for cameras, not mouths, which feels like a solid reason for the apocalypse.
Southeast Asia provides the best contrast. Tourists in Thailand or Bali pore over TripAdvisor with missionary zeal, convinced that stars and rankings hold the key to enlightenment. Locals, meanwhile, just ask their auntie where to eat and end up with the kind of meal tourists dream of but will never find. If the human species collapses under the weight of its own stupidity, I’m fairly sure it’ll be because we trusted the word of “TravelGuy92” over an actual grandmother with a wok.
The Middle East is another world altogether. In Dubai or Doha, expats and visitors cling to Google and Zomato reviews like life rafts. Locals? They call their cousin, or more likely, they already own the restaurant. This I appreciate and have been the absolute beneficiary of…
And in much of Africa, the review culture is still catching on. Tourists use TripAdvisor obsessively; locals use something more reliable: actual human conversation. Imagine that — talking to people you know! If civilization ends, I hope it’s the Africans who rebuild it. They’ll be fine — they won’t be arguing over whether the coffee was a “little bitter” while the cities burn.
Latin America sits in the middle. Google Maps is a daily tool for locals in Mexico or Brazil, but there’s still a strong word-of-mouth culture. Increasingly, though, anonymous reviews are being replaced by Instagram influencers — at least you know whose face to blame when the ceviche is bad. Unless it’s an AI. Then you won’t know.
Here’s the paradox. Reviews are ridiculous. They’re written by whiny customers, bitter tourists, bots, and that one person who thinks a one-star is appropriate because the waiter didn’t smile enough. And yet… patterns emerge. If a hundred people in São Paulo say the coffee was cold, the coffee was cold. If a Paris hotel racks up endless mentions of “charming staff,” chances are someone there really is charming.
The reason we cling to reviews, despite knowing they’re often garbage, is because we human beings are, at our core, cowards when faced with choice. Psychologists call it “decision fatigue.” I call it “the terror of ordering the wrong sandwich.” Reviews rescue us from the abyss of free will. Why risk your own judgment when Karen from Ohio has already sacrificed herself on the altar of mediocrity and lived to post about it?
We’re also addicted to consensus. It’s the herd instinct dressed up as rational consumer behavior. If ten thousand strangers agree this is the best ramen in Tokyo, then clearly it’s safe for me to think so too. It doesn’t even matter if the ramen is average; what matters is the comfort of knowing you won’t be the idiot who chose the wrong place. Reviews don’t just guide our taste—they protect our fragile egos. And that ego-protection is strong enough that if someone left a two-star review of oxygen, we’d all start holding our breath.
Because just imagine you had a bad experience! Just imagine something was not perfect. As my friend Sue says, you’ll be ok, you’ll eat again…
Then there’s the emotional factor. Reviews aren’t about accuracy; they’re about storytelling. Someone writes, “The waiter remembered my kid’s name,” and suddenly we’re swooning like it’s Shakespeare. A hundred technical details about portion size or wine lists won’t move us—but one schmaltzy anecdote about “feeling at home” seals the deal.
And of course, the absurdity. We live in a world where people leave one-star reviews of the Great Wall of China (“Not so great”), the Eiffel Tower (“too pointy”), and the Grand Canyon (“just a big hole”). Natural wonders that have stood for millennia are now being critiqued with the same gravitas as a microwave on Amazon. You can find reviews of the Pyramids complaining there was “too much sand,” and reviews of the Taj Mahal grumbling “would be better if they put a Starbucks nearby.”
This is humanity in its twilight: rating monuments of human civilization with the same fury we reserve for a slow DoorDash delivery.
So yes, reviews are the plague of our age. They’re noisy, biased, contradictory, and often idiotic. And yet we can’t live without them. They are our talisman against regret, our shield against disappointment, our desperate little insurance policy that maybe, just maybe, we’re making the right choice in a world designed to overwhelm us.
Which is why, despite knowing better, despite our skepticism of clueless strangers and even the exalted Michelin stars, we still find ourselves scrolling. Hoping the mob will guide us. Trusting the collective judgment of people we wouldn’t trust to water our plants. Beyoncé help us all! And if this is the hill humanity has chosen to die on — arguing whether the Louvre “wasn’t worth the price” — maybe we deserve extinction, after all.