Are Food Rating Apps Reinforcing Bias Against Asian Restaurants?

“This place looks good,” I told my friends as we huddled around my phone, scrolling on Google Maps for a lunch spot. After performing a thorough analysis — skimming Yelp reviews, browsing photos, and scanning the menu — we chose a restaurant. Despite our hunger, we couldn’t start eating until we got photos first. 

This ritual has become second nature whenever my friends and I eat out. Craving sushi, pizza, dim sum, or pasta? With just a few taps, our phones offer seemingly endless possibilities. It takes seconds to filter by price, location, and ratings. 

Behind every star rating is a diner’s opinion, and together those judgments can shape a restaurant’s reputation and survival.

Apps like Yelp and OpenTable have turned everyday consumers into food critics. People share their impressions online for anyone and everyone to see — whether the dessert is forgettable, the service exceptional or just so-so, or the space has the right vibes.

Unfortunately, studies show that negative reviews disproportionately go toward Asian-owned restaurants and businesses. 

A Longstanding Stigma Against Asian Restaurants

Asian restaurants have been criticized for decades. 

One of the biggest controversial topics surrounding Asian restaurants is the use of MSG — monosodium glutamate — a salt that enhances food flavor. It has been depicted as a sort of poison — a mysterious seasoning that causes adverse health effects. But the FDA has always categorized it as “generally recognized as safe.” 

Reports of adverse health effects from eating at Chinese restaurants sparked the term “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.” And despite many articles disputing this claim, Yelp users have reported that the product caused headaches, increased heart rate, and sleeplessness. Those stereotypes stuck, and people blamed it on MSG. Although the product was never fully banned, reports and controversies about its health effects became more and more prominent throughout the 1970s. 

The stereotype that Asian restaurants are unsafe extends beyond the MSG conversation. 

Unfortunately, the culture and politics of 2020 were even more unfriendly to Asian restaurants. 

A study found that Asian restaurant customers dropped by nearly 20% in 2020, equating to a $7.4 billion loss in revenue. According to NBC, searches for “Chinese people eat dogs” spiked in the U.S., contributing to the long-standing and harmful stereotype. President Donald Trump heavily blamed China for the pandemic, labeling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” or “Kung flu.” 

This language further stigmatized the cleanliness and sanitation of Asian restaurants, with Chinese restaurants receiving more health inspections than any other cuisine. 

What Do Food Rating Apps Have to Do With This?

In 2014, writer Andrew Simmons set out to conduct an informal study for Slate to explore how the popular food rating platform Yelp ranked different cuisines. His suspicions were correct: Out of the top 100 references to “poisoning” on Yelp, Simmons found that 44% of those accused restaurants were Asian. 

NBC reported that Yelp removed nearly 2,000 racist and hateful restaurant reviews for Asian-owned businesses in 2023, a sharp increase from years before. This language wasn’t unique to food rating platforms. On social media like Twitter, similar content flourished. 

Jocelyn Tan, a 20-year-old from the Bay Area, used to go to a particular Chinese restaurant every week as a child. Even though she thought the food was delicious and the staff was kind, the many bad Google reviews of that same restaurant said otherwise. 

“I’ll notice that a lot of the time, there’ll be reviews that say something about the service being bad, the cleanliness of the restaurant, or that they were feeling rushed,” she said. “But I know growing up, going to this restaurant every single week, this is not the case.”

There is also a myth that lower health inspection scores or bad service mean the restaurant is more authentic. A study done by the Stanford Graduate School of Business showed that consumers valued authenticity over cleanliness. In some cases, violating health codes was even rewarded because the food appeared more authentic. 

“Authenticity is a concept that is so broad that often people, particularly white people, use the idea of ‘authenticity’ to showcase their knowledge and claim authority over a cuisine,” wrote Takeshi Watanabe, an associate professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. 

Watanabe referenced an article written by Sara Kay, a New York University graduate who wrote her master’s thesis on the topic of authenticity in food. Kay wrote an article for Eater titled “Yelp Reviewers’ Authenticity Fetish Is White Supremacy in Action” to prove how authenticity labels are products of white supremacy. 

After reading over 20,000 Yelp reviews of popular cuisines in New York City, Kay found that 85% of reviews mentioning authenticity were associated with dirt floors and plastic stools. But when commenting on white/European restaurants, authenticity was associated with positive traits such as elegance. 

“While it might seem good to label restaurants as authentic, the usage of the term builds an authenticity trap where reviews reinforce harmful stereotypes that then become nearly impossible for restaurateurs to shake off,” Kay wrote. 

A 2018 Facebook post read: “How to know if the Asian restaurant is good. 1. Grungy-looking hole in the wall location 2. Sanitation is not important; dirty means flavor 3. Mean cashier person, aka ‘Dragon Lady’ 4. Lots of Asians are eating there, if you walk in and see tons of non-Asians … walk your ass back out.”

The comments on the post are in full agreement with the author, with Facebook users commenting about their experiences at unclean Asian restaurants. 

“We may score A’s in school, but our food sanitation scores [are] in the B’s and C’s,” someone replied. 

“You know the food is gonna be bomb if you peek behind the kitchen curtain and the cook is wearing a holey white T-shirt while smoking a Marlboro Light 100 over the cooking wok,” another wrote. 

“Cheap, dirty, but delicious. Right?” another added. 

Whether or not a restaurant is culturally authentic, its cleanliness standards can make the business appear one way or another. 

“Even if I don’t necessarily like a restaurant as much, I’ll usually boost the rating based on how authentic I think it is,” Tan reflected. “But also, if the food is just OK at a nice aesthetic place versus a hole-in-the-wall place, I will generally rate the nicer place better if the food is the same quality.” 

Tan also said that the patronage usually impacts what she thinks about a particular restaurant. “If I notice that it’s a lot of older Asian people working and eating there, I trust the restaurant more, because I feel like my elders know better,” she said. 

Can New Apps Change the Way We Rate Food?

As traditional platforms like Yelp face growing criticism for perpetuating bias, new social-based review apps like Beli are experimenting with a different approach. Despite having launched just a few years back, it has already received more restaurant ratings than Yelp. 

Tan, a self-proclaimed foodie from the Bay Area, downloaded Beli a few months ago when it was just gaining popularity. “I wanted a way to keep track of all the places I ate at, and then some of my friends were already on it,” Tan said. 

Beli operates more like a social media app than a food review database, whereas other food apps crowdsource reviews and allow users more anonymity. Users can see where their friends have eaten, tag others, and post pictures of their food. “The social aspect gives you a way to connect with your friends, because you know what they’re up to and you know what they’ve been eating,” Tan said. 

As someone who has used Yelp and Beli extensively, 19-year-old Emily Sun appreciates both for their distinct purposes. “On Beli, it’s harder to see reviews from other people,” Sun remarked. “Yelp is really useful in that way, where you can look at diverse perspectives on the same restaurant, instead of Beli, where it’s just like you’re talking to your friends.”

Beli ratings on Asian restaurants seem to differ from Yelp as well. The top five trending foods and cuisines in the U.S. are Taiwanese, Vietnamese, steakhouses, ramen, and Chinese. With four out of five of these cuisines being Asian, it appears that users are favoring those restaurants. 

But even with new apps, our own perceptions shape what we deem authentic, clean, or worth the hype. Whether on Yelp or Beli, how we talk about food continues to reveal what we value — and who we listen to. Restaurants and their workers strive, survive, or fail based on these ratings, and it’s important to remember how the reviews we give them reflect society’s biases.