Turns Out The No. 1 Montreal Restaurant on Tripadvisor Was a Total Fake
That didn’t keep people from trying to eat at Le Nouveau Duluth.
SEBASTIEN ST-JEAN/Getty Images
Le Nouveau Duluth, until recently the No. 1 Montreal restaurant on Tripadvisor, seemed to check every box. With 85 solid five-star reviews — in fact, no reviews with fewer than five stars — the “Deli, Canadian” eatery was purportedly open 24 hours a day and served “Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch, After-hours [meals and] Drinks.” It offered “Delivery, Takeout, Reservations, Outdoor Seating, Buffet, Private Dining …” as well as “Television” and “Table Service.”
At Le Nouveau Duluth, diners could anticipate enjoying “Live Music,” a “Drive Thru,” “Playgrounds” and a “Beach.” You’d find wheelchair accessibility, high chairs for the kids and “Free Wifi,” along with a place that was both “Dog friendly” and “Family style.” You could count on “Validated Parking, Valet Parking, Free off-street parking” as well as a dining establishment that accepted all major credit cards and digital payments, but was also “Cash Only.”
And if all that sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. The Tripadvisor listing for the top restaurant in Montreal (number one of 3,678 restaurants listed for the city) was not real.
Sure, there were plenty of clues that the listing, which was removed following questions from CBC News for a recent story exposing it, was fake. The top review on the listing page, for instance, was titled “Can't believe this place really exist” and none of the reviewers had left reviews for other restaurants, the CBC reported.
Also, the photos didn’t quite add up. “There’s a very high ceiling [in the photos],” the proprietor of a flower shop next door to Le Nouveau Duluth’s listed location told the CBC. “On Duluth there are no high ceilings ... it looks fake.” That didn’t stop tourists from regularly stopping into her shop to inquire about the restaurant, though.
Speaking of the photos in the listing: Two of the four photos appeared to show a living room, one a sports bar, and the other a dude: Quebec comedian Charles Deschamps.
Yep, you guessed it: Deschamps admitted to the CBC that he had set up the page, which he said featured photos of a friend’s basement, as a gag with another pal to both amuse and to underscore that social-media rating sites are not always entirely reliable — as kind of an act of revenge.
“One person destroyed a friend’s spot on social media,” Deschamps told the CBC. “She asked 22 people to leave a one-star review just because a wine glass was spilled on a dress.”
People totally fell for the gag. “I received one call a month to book,” Deschamps told Radio-Canada. “I said we were full for the next two months. When people would ask for the menu, I would respond with ‘we make tapas!’” He was compelled to remove the geolocation tag from the listing after someone turned up at the house of the friend whose basement was pictured.
Tripadvisor, which has now taken down the listing, has insisted that such fakes are rare and explained that this one reflected “a failure in human moderation practices.”
Of course, close perusal of the page would probably have alerted many diners to the scam — the photos that didn’t add up, the lack of anything other than five-star reviews, all those features (many of them mutually exclusive), the picture of the comedian.
And if you’re traveling to Montreal and are concerned, rest assured, the current No. 1 restaurant in the city on Tripadvisor — Bistro 1843 — is, by all accounts, quite real. It has only four and a half stars (and a scant 21 reviews) on Yelp, though.
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