This is the main problem I have with Restaurant Week. Whenever I'm traveling, I like to use Yelp to find good places to eat. And very frequently I'll find clusters of horrible reviews of places that seem to otherwise have good reviews, all attributable to Restaurant Week. It took me a while to catch on to this. Most of the reviews don't mention that they went during RW, they just say the food/and or service was terrible ("overpriced," "overrated," etc.). Sometimes I'm lucky enough that one will mention RW, and then I realize I can completely ignore all the other reivews posted around the same time.

Now that I've recognized the pattern, when I see groups of reviews that are incongruent with the rest, I will sometimes actually look up when restaurant week was in that city, so I know which ones to ignore. But I wish Yelp had a way to just filter out all Restaurant Week reviews from the ratings, because I find them completely irrelevant. Not only is the experience during RW different from the "true" experience of that restaurant, but also the clientele seems to not be the normal clientele of the restaurant. If they aren't regular patrons of "fancy" restaurants, their expectations will be different and also they won't have enough basis for comparison to provide an accurate review.

In short, I don't really care if restaurants participate, but I do care when people post reviews of restaurants based on experiences during Restaurant Week.