“Hey! This restaurant has great reviews, it has all five stars. I think we should go and try this one out.”

 

When we travel we like to try new things (related to food). A coffee shop, a restaurant, an

ice-cream place, anything that give us a new perspective of things and new flavors. Even close to home I am always in the look out for a new place to go and try something new. For this I love to use Groupon ( I had talk about this before) and also I consult Yelp.

Usually the process starts searching the area where we are at a given moment. For that I used my great friend “Yelp”. After looking, I select the ones that look more appealing for my needs at the moment and then I check the reviews.

Jorge and I try to look for those places that have more than two or three reviews. We look at the dates that the reviews were written and we read the comments. At least we scan the reviews to see if is worth to read. Then we look for pictures and see if the pics call us by our names.

Well…after doing so much investigation we make a decision hoping that our experience is going to be as good or better. Then sometimes our expectation could go a little higher than it supposed to.

 

This past Monday, after a great wedding weekend in Brooklyn we were going back home but first we wanted to have breakfast in a local, small coffee place. We went through the process like I described it above and Jorge read the word CREPE. That was enough to narrow down our options. It was fine with me, I like crepes!

We found this little place were the reviews were pretty good between 4 and 5 stars most of them. To make the story short we walk around 10 minutes with all our stuff (luggage) with us, we were hungry and excited to sit and enjoy some good coffee and breakfast before heading to the city.

The place was small, cute and cozy. At the moment we got in, there wasn’t anybody at the little restaurant. We were putting our stuff away when the owner told us that they were close, that they haven’t open it yet. My face change colors. A thousand disappointment expressions came across my face also. But then he start laughing and acknowledge me about my face. He told us it was a joke and we laugh with him. We order coffee, some crepes with eggs and everything else, I added two cheeses, mozzarella and goat.

The coffee was good, we got that first. I was trying to hold my coffee as much as I could, because I like to eat and drink coffee at the same time. The crepes… Let me put it this way, they were AWFUL! The funny thing is that we were the only ones in this tiny place with the owner. There was no way that we could run away from this place without the owner knowing that we totally dislike the food. Believe me! I want it to run away so bad. I looked at Jorge, Jorge looked at me and between facial expressions and no words we communicate our frustration.

I am not a rude person, I didn’t want to make the owner feel bad, Jorge neither. So, believe it or not we ate almost the whole thing. Now I know the feeling of eating just for survival and not for pleasure.

Our conclusion, the reviews are relative. This is the second time that I go through this situation of reading good reviews and then my experience is completely different. I went back to Yelp and read more carefully the reviews, definitely people like this place. Is either that we did a poor choice from the menu or our taste is not built for that place.

I will not share the name of the coffee shop because I choose not to put down the place, when there are so many people who like it. I just wanted to reflect on the fact that a review will not always give you the answer, sometimes you have to check places no matter what other people think. We had the experience before to go and enjoy a place very much and then when we check out how people rate it is less than we think.

 

Each experience is different, and we all are different, what is good for me, may no be for you or vice versa.

Until then,

xamlinnette 🙂