Unabashed in their absurdity, a special category of Yelp reviews practically begs for satire.
While the modern restaurant review is in the midst of “a midlife crisis,” as the Los Angeles Review of Books highlighted last month — shifting from the model that’s been in place since the late 1950s, and its “old-fashioned views,” to reviews that tell a larger story about communities and food systems — the masses continue posting their screeds to online review sites.
With hundreds of millions of reviews and a subgroup of “Elite” Yelpers, user-generated ratings can greatly impact a restaurant’s success. But their power to make or break a business doesn’t render some of the reviewer sentiments any less ridiculous.
Recognizing this, Grace Hayes — a singer and comedian with a keen eye for pathos and poetic beauty — deflates the pettiness of Yelp reviews using music. As Eater reports, Hayes posted a series of songs to TikTok, each dedicated to a different fast food restaurant including McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Arby’s. Accompanying herself on keyboard, she highlights the hyperbole many online reviewers are prone to.
Hayes told Eater that as a jingle writer, she’s “always looking for new things to write about to keep (her) on (her) toes.” Inspired by the fact that so many fast food restaurants seemed to have garnered paltry one-star ratings on Yelp, she decided to incorporate the more irate laments into her lyrics: “While reading Taco Bell reviews I saw ‘I came for an empanada, but all I got was an argument,’ and knew I had to include that,” she said.
Some of Hayes’s lyrics are reminiscent of Neil Hamburger’s Taco Bell tweets of years past: hilarious with an overtone of food safety violations. But in her case, all delivered in dulcet tones. There’s Arby’s and its “mess of meats and curdled cheese,” and questionable colour: “Pardon me, but roast beef should not be grey or green.” As well as allegations that McDonald’s “tried to kill me with this undercooked patty meat” and the difficult-to-argue-with “I shouldn’t have to chew my coffee.”
There are customer service complaints, too. “They neglected to inform me they were out of beans,” Hayes sings of a grievance levelled at Taco Bell as she deadpans the closing line. “A tragedy. Truly a tragedy.”
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
