I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor by Oobah Butler Analysis Essay

In “I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor,” Oobah Butler shows that people cannot consistently trust what they see on the internet. In a span of seven months, Oobah was able to claim the #1 restaurant in London without ever actually serving food. The author writes about his former job, writing paid, fake reviews on Tripadvisor for restaurant owners and just how much of a positive impact the reviews were for the restaurant when truly, Butler had never even eaten there. The Tripadvisor page is set up with little resources and climbs Tripadvisor's rankings all the way to number one while collecting a plethora of calls, emails, and business offers all for a restaurant that does not exist. Oobah decides to open up “The Shed at Dulwich,” for a night and serves several parties of people microwave dinners, emulating top tier food. The waiter he hired served people based on their mood, tying into the restaurant's persona and its reviews as “unique” and “weird”. Overall the night goes quite well, resulting in a party wanting to book again to eat at “The Shed at Dulwich”. 

One thing I liked about Oobah’s article is how he pointed out that there are two different takeaways from his experiment. He explains in his last paragraph  that, “If I can transform my garden into London’s best restaurant, literally anything is possible.” If Oobah Butler, a little known writer (at the time) living in a tiny shed can get a restaurant to the top spot in one of the major cities of the world without having any employees, food, or even a restaurant shows just how much opportunity there is in the world. 

However, from a more cautious perspective, it is scary just how much people will believe on the internet. Butler points out in his article that “ People don’t trust their own senses over what they read online.” This hits home to me now more than ever because a week ago in class, we talked about how much technology has changed the way we think. We talked about how our brain has learned to skip the long research and find answers fast. When people saw the #1 restaurant and more importantly from a fairly trusted source, Tripadvisor, they were heavily influenced. A great relation I can make with this article is the recent high school football story taking the internet by storm, Bishop Sycamore. Bishop Sycamore, an online high school was able to finesse their way into two, ESPN televised high school football, claiming they had many players with high division one offers (they did not). The football team took quality TV time, playing two games within three days, the second game on August 29th, against number one ranked IMG, losing 58-0. Oobah did the same thing, he did not have a quality restaurant just as Bishop Sycamore did not have a quality football team.

I thought that Oobah did a great job in continuing his illusion as a top tier restaurant by playing the people talking as a background noise on the night he hosted reservations at his shed. It was also brilliant that he used actors to pretend to enjoy the food and talk about it rather loudly. I found it hilarious that after so much planning and dedication he managed to host people that were attracted to the restaurant by the vegetarian reviews, meanwhile he is advertising a “Pick your chicken” eating style where you pick the chicken you would like to eat, like fancy restaurants do with lobsters.