I know a variety of people whom I think are better off staying home because they're such picky eaters.

One time I was on a trip with three of them. Here's what happened when we went to a breakfast restaurant together:

Person #1 is very capable in a kitchen, cooks for herself frequently, and thus is accustomed to having food exactly as she wants. She wanted an omelet, but she wanted information about all the possible ingredients (e.g., "What kind of cheeses do you have? Are the mushrooms fresh or canned?") and ultimately ended up asking for a custom omelet in which she specified every. Single. Ingredient. Her order required several minutes of information gathering and negotiation. I swear it took her longer to order than it would have taken her to make an omelet in her own kitchen.

Person #2 has some dietary restrictions. He has to watch his sugar levels, and he knows he needs to cut down on cholesterol and salt, too. What he should do is order a fruit and yogurt plate and be done with it, but no, he wants to figure out exactly how much fried eggs, bacon, and hashed browns he can get without killing himself. So he's asking for nutrition counts on all kinds of "bad" foods, looking for substitutions, and asking for things like hashed browns made without salt added. Another several minutes of negotiation.

Person #3 has a few food allergies. There are also some things she plain doesn't like. Unfortunately some of these are common ingredients and condiments in restaurant food. She has to go through the ingredients list of everything on the menu and ask for removals or substitutions. "I'd like the western omelet but no bacon. I don't like pork. ... Oh, that's basically a veggie omelet? Okay, then give me a veggie omelet, but no onions. I'm allergic. I don't like toast, may I have extra potatoes instead. And a coffee, no cream. Don't even put cream on my side of the table, it grosses me out."

Finally the waitress looks at me. She is exhausted and worried because she has been standing at our table for literally 10 minutes while we've monopolized her time. "French toast, side of sausage links, tall orange juice," I say, matter-of-factly.

She looks at me again, waiting for MY questioning and negotiation to start.

"That'll do it for me, thanks."

I am sorry, you seem to have met my family already.

I love them, but wow, so picky.

You didn't say what the rest of the conversation was, but those two seem like perfectly legit questions (canned mushrooms can be a deal-breaker). I'm supposing the other questions were not as reasonable...

Asking a few questions like those is absolutely reasonable. Asking questions to the point that you have basically inventoried the restaurant's available ingredients, and then specifying a custom dish with them, is not.

"I'll have what she's having".

This is the part where I chuckle nervously and quietly mention that I was literally describing a breakfast with my wife and inlaws.

Yelp is totally useless. They "filter" any bad reviews and don't include them in their ratings. I had a particularly bad experience with a restaurant, wrote about it on Yelp, then went back to my review a couple of months later to find it hidden in the "filtered" reviews. Several other reviews with the same complaints were also hidden. Basically, Yelp hides all the bad reviews, assumably to garner ad money.

I use Yelp frequently. I have not seen a problem with their filtered reviews. I do check them occasionally when I'm curious about a particular business. What I invariably find is that the filtered-out reviews are all 1 or 2 sentences long, full of superlatives (best or worst ever), and written by people who've contributed only a few reviews total.

Basically the filtering is designed to address two problems with crowd sourcing: the business operators who create throwaway identities to post rave reviews of their own businesses, and the angry crusaders who feel wronged by a business and pan it on every reviews site they can think of. As a reviews site user I am glad to see these types of reviews filtered out. Does this filtering approach also catch some legitimate reviews by infrequent users? I'm sure it does. But you can write more or better reviews to get out of the filter.

My "favorite" Yelp review from Chicago was, in essence "I drove past and didn't like it." This before the place was even open.

http://www.yelp.com/user_details?use...PmPA4yeR0h7yRw

Here's another one. I went out for a nice din - looked up the place afterward.

I agree with your assessment of the Yelp filtered reviews. Most of them are from first time posters or they are from first time restaurant posters whose previous reviews were for mechanics or dry cleaning establishments. Frankly, I am more likely to read and trust Yelp reviews than Chowhound. I find the pretentiousness at Chowhound mind-boggling.

What's a good source to look at then? I tried looking up Frommer's reviews and similar, and seems like some of the more reputable sources require a subscription.. but these are professional reviews.. I do seem to be able to query reviews off the net, not knowing how reliable they are..

There are some restaurant critics I consider trustworthy. One is Jonathan Gold who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reviews in a decidedly non-mainstream paper, L.A. Weekly. He's a terrific writer and fun to read.

Wow! Unbelievable for him! I can't believe him that he won a fabulous prize, huh?

Amen !!!!

^