Japanese Restaurant-Rating Platforms

In North America, diners tend to rely on the biggest restaurant-rating apps — like Yelp — despite questioning their reliability, but the Japanese market seems to have found a workable solution with the nationwide 'Tabelog' platform. With a catalog of hundreds of thousands of restaurants throughout Japan (there are 131,000 listings in just Tokyo, for example), the app has managed to maintain reliability thanks to a stringent rating system.

On Yelp, as well as on most North American apps and platforms that employ rating systems, users tend to be relatively laissez-faire with their apportionment of stars. Most people give four or five stars to a restaurant unless it was notably bad, leaving thousands and thousands of restaurants of broad-spanning quality levels with the same 4.9 star rating. Tabelog is far stricter: on the 5-star rating system, 3.5 stars would be considered extremely good, while Michelin-starred fine dining establishments earn slightly over four, and no restaurant on the entire service has ever earned a 5-star rating.