Yelping About Architecture

If you happen to be reading my latest while dining out, the odds that you chose the restaurant as a result of reading yelp are about as good as a hair making an appearance in your soup.  If that's so, the place is also likely to be crawling with yelpers.  If your use of yelp is limited to consulting the site for restaurant recommendations, you might be hard-pressed to identify the yelpers.  Fret not, dear reader:  identifying a yelper is easier than identifying a Mason.

One thing yelpers don't do is acknowledge fellow yelpers with a series of gestures that, to the unfamiliar, resembles the carryings-on of the lunatic.  What I've described does not become the yelper - too gauche in such posh surroundings, as is a holler of "Hey, girl!" across a crowded restaurant.  You'll have to work a little harder to suss the yelper, but not too much.  If you spot someone in the foyer with a look of chagrin furiously scribbling something on his phone, you've likely identified a yelper, one who's upset that he hasn't yet been seated during peak hours.  They also like to gather in groups.  If you spot a party of three to five whose badinage is restrained yet hearty, you've likely identified a pack of yelpers.


Plus Personne Ne Peut M'accuser d'être <<White Trash>>

At this point, some disclosure is in order:  I consult yelp for a number of things, from finding out where a guy might get a good egg roll is this town to where I might find an obscure plumbing part.  I also yelp.  I yelp when my wife and I have eaten a meal worth yelping about (good or bad), about service received at a given business (more likely when the service is egregious such that, I like to think, I'm assuming the role of a consumer advocate), and, often, for the sheer joy of writing and the hell of it.  One of the personae I like to assume is that of the lout.  Boy I'll bet that makes yelp mad.  That tickles the devil out of me.

Still, to my mind, none of my yelping activities qualify me as a yelper.  I like the Grateful Dead, but I don't have the stomach to be a Deadhead.  I'm can't drop everything, pack a plastic shopping bag, and travel from one corner of the country to the other expecting everyone to give me money and food at all points of my psychedelic journey.

Likewise, I don't have the commitment, nor the savoir faire peculiar to yelp, necessary to fully surrender myself.  I am perfectly happy with my yelp outsider status, and I enjoy shopping at Big Lots and other businesses that attract a cheapskate like me.  Yelp just seems too rich for my blood.

I say, without shame, that I don't have the cultivation required for full membership.  Lack of cultivation is distinct from being an uneducated rube, which I am not (I paid good money for my degrees.)  I am, largely, disinterested in self-cultivation, and fully distrustful of cultivation as an enterprise.

For one, cultivation is conspicuous.  With the Information Age (is the term too quaint?  Does it beg cultivation?) in full swing, one cannot afford to be caught with his pants down.  His boss might be looking!  Worst still, his boss' boss might be looking over the shoulder of his boss!  That's why he's advised to mind his P's and Q's and take down that profile picture taken on he night he stuck the lampshade on his head and balanced a Budweiser tall boy on it.  The savages he hung out with that night sure got a kick of it.  The boss, on the other hand, is less than amused with his employee's shenanigans.  "Does he do that when I'm not looking?"  The picture he took at MoMA speaks better of him.  Now the boss thinks his employee is smart and cultured.

For another, cultivation is an act of negation.  When a person takes voice and diction lessons in an effort to remove all vestiges of his Southern twang (and, by extension, those that betray his Southern upbringing) and winds up sounding like William F. Buckley, that person engages in cultivating himself out of existence.  No longer can his peers claim that he's "white trash like me."  His boss thinks he's well-spoken.

Ultimately, acts performed in the name of cultivation are designed to help one get a leg up in the class above that he currently occupies, while, at the same time, his perceived lessers' grip loosens, a most propitious, welcome byproduct.  When one's grown sick and tired of driving that hunk of junk, eating junk, and staying at home and watching junk because he can't afford to go out and, as I've heard it put, "hang with the effective crowd," he's advised to take up ostentatious jogging, use NPR and The Daily Show as his sources for current events, both political and cultural, and start watching Girls because it serves as the voice for not only its generation, but, better put, the Zeitgeist.  He's advised to list them as favorites on Facebook.  His boss thinks he's hip and fit.  He can work some overtime without breaking a sweat, and look cool doing it.  

His friends will also advise him to splurge once in a while.  There's this place, godot's.  I read about it on yelp.  It just opened up.  Me and some buddies from the office are going on Friday after work.  Dude, their happy hour is supposed to be cray-cray, and they have a Four Horsemen, except they call theirs the Five Horsemen!  It's supposed to be in-teeeeense.  Dude, I'm worried about you, bro.  Tell you what, bro - first horsemen's on me.

His friend is right, so he'll go.  He'll drink six Five Horsemen, eat a Kobe beef burger with serrano ham, have some selfies taken, deal with the hangover on Saturday, and finagle rent on Monday.  His friends will drive him home because he had one horseman too many, and he'll spend much of the latter part of Saturday and Sunday scrubbing off the dicks his pals drew all over him Friday night because he can't go in looking like that on Monday.  He's advised to check Facebook sometime over the weekend - there are pictures up that his boss won't like.

Yelp is an all but essential vehicle if he wants to show everyone how much he's grown.


We Waited at godot's For What Seemed, Like, an Eternity Before We Were Seated


Food has become as treasured as books and virginity used to be, and yelpers seem to know better about what tastes good than anyone else.  One yelper's nickname (yelp asks you to choose a nickname, and I'm certain that all power yelpers have one) is "french fries....hand cut, fried twice, no exceptions. got it?"  Got it boss man, right away, and hand cut, if you're reading this, like, duh!

Not only do yelpers know what tastes good, they also know where to get it.  Moreover, yelpers aren't ginger when it comes to writing about their transcendent eating experiences.  It seems that they reserve their most florid prose for the most floridly priced and praised restaurants.  What follows are examples of purple prose written about a local establishment called The Hay Merchant, a relatively recent addition to Montrose that boasts 274 reviews and an aggregate yelp score of four stars.  My wife and I visited The Hay Merchant three or four times when we were the drinking kind.

First, my review (not published on yelp):  Quality and sheer selection of beers considered, a wealthy man could conceivably drink his way to a happy death.  I wish I could say the same for the food!  I've had a hambuger/chili-cheese fries combo from Sonic that was comparable in most ways, save price.  The wealthy man is well advised to spend his food dollar at The Hay Merchant's next-door neighbor, Underbelly, between bouts, if the scuttlebutt is to be trusted.

Hope my boss isn't reading this!

Why don't we, instead, read the words that come from more informed tongues?  Their words follow:

"I put the fun in funeral" luxuriated re:  the pig ears:  "The pig ears were amazing-like fried bacon, but better." (sic)  [Five Stars]


No Nickname wrote, 

Astonishing beer selection and inventive, delicious pub menu. I love this place. Sadly though, on our most recent visit (a busy Wednesday), the service was abysmal. Complete indifference from the front staff. I'll be back for the food and drink, and hopefully they'll get their act together on the service end [Four Stars]

Finally, and from undoubtedly the yelper with the best yelp nickname I've encountered yet, "PRUVEIT - that's what my license plate says."   

Ok, I'm a little late on writing this review, but wanted to definitely get this one in!

Great place for dinner, drinks, oh and did I say drinks.  Beer - tons of everything on tap, mainly from local (Texas) brewerys and they are indeed tasty.  Lots of Belgium esque beer, mmmm.

Food, great and good healthy portions.  Fried chicken and maccaroni are phenominal, gotta love it.  Great portions too.

You can go here to have a nice dinner with friends at a table, or drinks and food at the bar, or just plain old drinks at the bar or outside on the patio.

It's not your typical bar scene, which is nice.  Go here to drink good beer, eat good food, and just chill.

Just go!  (sic) [Four Stars]

Besides licentious spelling and grammar (though, in "Pruevit"'s defense and in his words, he "definitely had to get [his review] in"), one item of note is the Most Sensibly Nicknamed No Nickname's mention of "abysmal" service.  I've read more than my fair share of restaurant reviews on yelp, and, surely as ants will swarm a dog a day dead, a yelper will yelp about a service slight, busy night or not.  In my experience as a restaurant gadabout, I can recall but two instances of service so bad that they warranted any amount of attention; for yelpers, bad service seems like a fait accompli.  Never does bad service go unmentioned.  Yelpers don't go out with a whimper.  Many of them yelp before leaving.  

In the Room the Yelpers Came and Went


Bad service's frequency of mention leads me to believe that service, or maybe even the food, is not the true subject of discussion at all.  Really, the yelper yelps about himself.  If, like me, you're the type of masochist who'll endure mild discomfort in the name of entertainment, surely you've noticed this, too.  If you really want to get your kicks, make friends with someone who's well-heeled with yelp and beg this new friend to invite you to a Yelp Elite party.

I've attended several of these so-called "Elite" parties (short and blunt, becoming an Elite is nothing like becoming a Green Beret), and, enjoying the privileges membership bestows, if only for an evening, I cadged all the high-class food and drink I wanted.  Almost as much, I enjoyed listening to yelpers yelp on and on about themselves.  If they're to be believed, yelpers are true movers and shakers, real shapers of opinion who dropped the names of cool people, places that pained them to pronounce, and shiny things they paid pretty pennies for with the same elan it took to fill their faces with free food, and every bit as effortlessly as the fellow who stopped, dropped, and yelped after the house had served him one too many pink drinks.  I wonder whether yelpers have ever yelped about yelp or yelpers other than themselves (if I were a yelper, yes.)  I also wonder whether the yelper who yelped a night's worth of pink drinks is still in yelp's good graces.

Yelp:  Reviews You Can Trust



This past weekend, my wife and I decided that we desperately needed a foray well outside Montrose, which, for me at least, had become too stifling due, in part, to the unbending smirks its new residents probably picked up at Walmart.  They'd never tell you, and they'd sooner do that than yelp about Walmart and its smirk aisle.  

We were on the way to Katy when we'd just passed the entertainment complex on I-10 across the street from Ikea.  We'd both heard about about this Asian buffet that sits near a bowling alley within the complex.  As legend has it, the buffet is a like a double decker luxury liner filled to groaning with food, only moored adjacent to a Dave and Buster's and the bowling alley.

Traffic was only getting thicker the farther west we went, and we were starved.  We were fast upon the U-Turn when we decided to ditch the Katy idea and head for the buffet.  When we hit the eastbound feeder, our excitement mounted.  Still, I was a bit apprehensive.  

Opinion about the place was as colorful and loud as a grown man brought to his knees by a pink drink too many, except on yelp.  The place had been reviewed seventy-four times, and had an aggregate score of three stars.  Sushi was good, not great.  Selection was dazzling, and every item was good, but not up to yelp snuff.  As I negotiated the left turn to the restaurant, I chuckled to myself.  "Gets three stars on yelp.  Can't be that bad!"  

All that food (including a churrascaria?), but no egg rolls?  The sushi was not only not great, it was also hot and gray in the middle.  My mind was made, and my notes detailed.  I, too, would weigh in.  I didn't think twice. 

Five Stars. 

I told you I'm not a yelper.