OpenRice reviews should be taken with a pinch of salt, say critics
OpenRice is the most widely used restaurant guide in Hong Kong, but it faces constant criticism from both sides of the dining experience, writes Charley Lanyon
Fifteen years after former IT executive Ray Chung Wai-man founded the site with a group of friends in 1999, OpenRice now lists one million outlets worldwide. It has had 1.6 million reviews, mostly crowd-sourced, and more than 200 new ones are posted daily. This rise, however, has also brought accusations of unethical practices, victimisation of certain outlets and industry complaints about undue influence from inexperienced, or ignorant, reviewers.
OpenRice was not always the runaway success it is today. Its parent company closed a year after launch and Chung kept the website alive by working from home with minimal resources. Things began to look up after 2007, when the site was bought by digital media company JDB Holdings. The new owners revamped OpenRice, brought in advertisers and added features for restaurants to promote themselves and to enable users to make reservations online.
No matter how a restaurant engages with us as a client, they cannot change the reviews
As its fortunes improved, questions about the site's credibility began to surface among some of its faithful users.
Among the prominent names to turn their backs on OpenRice was K.C. Koo, a stockbroker turned full-time food blogger who writes Chinese-language reviews under the name KC Gourmet.
Koo's prolific and detailed write-ups - "I have more than 7,300 reviews on OpenRice, reviewing more than 7,200 restaurants. I think that's quite extensive, right?" he says - were so popular with readers that he decided to start his own food blog. That was also the time, however, that he began to pull away from the site.
"There were changes at OpenRice that I wasn't comfortable with," Koo says. "The credibility of the website was very high before, but when they sold the whole thing to JDB, they put in a lot of advertisements from the restaurants themselves and that affected the credibility of the website and my credibility as well."
