Reviews, at times, can give you a a better glimpse into the restaurant’s true self. All Aspen Restaurant Reviews on EatAspen are user submitted content. That means, anyone that would like to comment on anything about their dining experience is welcome to. If you would like to contribute to the conversation, please write a review.
We do keep an eye to make sure the reviews are legit but even so some reviews may be biased in one direction or another. It isn’t a surprise that some submissions may come from friends of the restaurants or from disgruntled employees. So what should you believe? I do believe that in sifting through all the reviews, you will find the truth. Certain themes will reappear, certain things will ring clear, one reviewer will seem to nail it.
“That place is terrible!” Did you know that someone is 20x more likely to tell people about a bad experience than they are a good experience. Hence we get some glaring bad reviews. Its not easy posting negative reviews being a local Aspen website and knowing the restaurants fairly intimately, but we must. We are unbiased wether they are good or bad Aspen Restaurant Reviews. I hate to see the bad reviews, but it happens.
This response, by John Talbot, to why he wrote negative Aspen restaurant reviews says alot.
“The whole interaction between critics and those in the food business is an interesting one; we are all (as Olivier Morteau [pseud] pointed out in “Food Business: La face cachée de la gastronomie française”) dependent on one another; critics must have restaurants about which to critique and restaurateurs must have critics to assess their efforts. But like book authors or theatrical producers, chefs and owners fear and loath most critics, bowing and scaping and comp’ing those who identify themselves or as in France, whose photos are posted on the kitchen wall. As for writing negative reports, I have writer colleagues who only publish good reviews because they want to go back and eat free; I have others who couple each negative review with a positive one; and yet others who go on and on about the setting, decor and nappery to the exclusion of evaluating the food, which as Francois Simon pointed out probably means he or she had a lousy meal. Then again, as Simon and I have pointed out, it’s much easier to write a negative review, largely I think because there are so many more colorful negative adjectives and adverbs than positive ones, but also let’s face it, most restaurants that open in a city like Paris or even Aspen are substandard (example, each week Paris greets five new places, of which Emmanuel Rubin, finds exemplary merit in one, if he’s lucky). Finally, though, it’s important to have negative reports because if all one finds in the corrupt guidebooks and adulatory blogs are gushing reviews, it leads to disappointment on the part of the reader/diner and ultimately lack of credibility in a critic’s judgment. As to why Colette keeps ordering gaspacho when she makes a pretty mean one, it’s probably for the same reason I order Bolognese sauce, which will never meet the gold standard Luigi Buitoni helped us set at his Locanda della Rocca in Paciano, Perugia, Umbria – I want to find one just good as ours.” John Talbot’s Paris
As always, All reviews on EatAspen.com are the opinions of the individual reviewers. Eat Aspen LLC merely provides a forum for these opinions and is not responsible for their content. Restaurant owners wishing to respond to reviews, please contact us.
These problems are not new and if you would like to read some additional articles on Online Reviews see below.