Seven Ocean Opens in Oak Park. Yelp! Review Quickly Follows

Seven Ocean Opens in Oak Park. Yelp! Review Quickly Follows

Seven Ocean has opened on Marion St., and I’m always glad to see new restaurants starting up in The People’s Republic of Oak Park... particularly when people I know and trust provide positive first-hand accounts about the place.

Planning my visit, I Googled Seven Ocean and came upon a write-up on Yelp!

Over the years, Yelp! has proven itself to be a somewhat valuable resource, despite claims of some restaurants that this provider of online information will “bury” bad reviews and foreground good reviews if you buy advertising with them. Still, sometimes, I find that Yelp! will have a link to a restaurant website that’s easier to find on the Google listing than the restaurant site itself (any restaurant that doesn’t open with a website is guilty of a large albeit easily fixable oversight, and Seven Ocean really should have a website up and running by now).

Since its inception, I’ve co-moderated LTHForum.com. In that time, we mods have come across hundreds of “shills,” people who post about a restaurant but who clearly have some vested interest in the place. Usually, these shills are first-timers (they’ve never posted before); these shills sometimes join the very day they post their first “review”; their word-heavy impressions are overwhelmingly positive, and they sound a little too…slick.

On the 12th of this month, days after Seven Ocean opened, Eldon P. posted on Yelp! Eldon P. posted on Yelp! that “the first thing that struck me about Seven Ocean was its fabulous decor. It is striking yet subtle, the epitome of elegant simplicity. The decor was more than just eye-candy, though. The chairs are so much more comfortable than a typical restaurant. It seems like such a minute detail to mention but I can't count how many times I've had a fantastic meal ruined by some art deco, back-destroying chair.”

This gushy, unrelentingly positive review continues, explaining how, despite initial trepidation, the poster was won over by Seven Ocean,

Eldon P makes many invidious comparisons with other local restaurants, for instance: “our server (who was exceptionally charming and knowledgable [sic], definitely not like some of the acne-ridden incompetents that staff other area restaurants) selected a few bottles for the table that were delectable and perfectly matched.”

This first-time poster joined Yelp! in the first days of the restaurant’s opening, has only put up this one post on Yelp!, and seems to speak with the solicitousness and smooth assurance of a marketing copywriter (I am of this breed, so I recognize the type): “The first course came out very promptly and what followed was a.7-course culinary journey through the east and the west, that ran the gamut from the delicate and nuanced flavors of the lemongrass broth served over the pan seared tiger prawn with shiitake mushrooms, to the decadent sumptuousness of the slow-braised pork belly with a five-spice glaze and fresh sliced tangerine. By far, my favorite dish was the prime top sirloin, slow cooked in a massaman curry sauce. At the end of the meal I was turned from a skeptic into a believer.”

Uh, hunh. Maybe…but I’m still solidly skeptical about this post.

Eldon P., who gives his location as “Oak Park,” fits the profile of a shill, but he could very well be a legitimately enthusiastic fan of Seven Ocean. If I ran Yelp!, however, I’d email Eldon P. to ask him to disclose any association with the restaurant. He could be just a friend of one of the servers (perhaps the “exceptionally charming” one), or perhaps a newly loyal customer (he’s been to Seven Ocean twice as of 12/12, meaning he was apparently there twice in its first week or so of opening).

All I can say is, after a decade of spending my time weeding out the shills from the honest posters on LTHForum.com, my shill-dar is always on…and it sounded a loud alert when I read this post on Yelp!

To be fair, it’s very possible that Seven Ocean knows nothing about this post, and I look forward to eating at Seven Ocean and making up my own mind about the food they serve.

And to shills everywhere – and this may not include Eldon P. – you do restaurants no service by promoting them in a way that misrepresents who you are and that is, fundamentally, dishonest.

I know that a lot of people on LTH are already aware of these issues, but this particular Yelp! post hits close to home. Thank you for the opp to vent.

I recently subscribed to the RSS feed for Everyblock for my zipcode. One thing they post daily is a list of recent Yelp reviews for places in 60657, organized by how many stars each place has.

When you see something like...

Five stars:
Random Place
Another Random Place
A 3rd Random Place
Place that's awful
Place that's awful
Place that's awful
Place that's awful

...you just know that shills are at work. I usually click through out of curiosity and without fail, the five-star reviews all come from first-time posters. While I'm not a Yelp fan, I am anti-shill, so I always flag the post & simply comment, "Rave review from first-time poster seems suspect." To Yelp's credit, they usually filter out the review.

There's a computer repair place in my 'hood that's gotten a little more sophisticated at the shill reviews. It's owned by someone originally from a country that doesn't seem to send many immigrants to Chicago. How are their shill posts easy to spot? No will will have anything positive to say about the place for months at a time, then a bunch of 5-star reviews get posted in rapid succession. These reviews aren't by first-time posters, but almost unfailingly the poster has only reviewed one other spot: Another nearby business owned by someone originally from the same not-too-common-to-Chicago country.

My problem with Yelp is that I stop by so infrequently--nearly ever in Chicago, but occasionally in other towns--that I just don't have any idea of the backgrounds and tastes of the posters. Still, that said, I believe Yelp does a good job of organizing itself in ways that make it easy to identify aberrant and shill posters (e.g, showing a scale of reviews, identifying poster's status, etc.). Believe me, I see tons of nice features in Yelp.

It seems like such a minute detail to mention but I can't count how many times I've had a fantastic meal ruined by some art deco, back-destroying chair

Obviously poor Eldon wouldn't know good taste in furniture if it hit him on the head. Everyone knows an uncomfortable art deco chair is always the best kind for decor.

BTW, I found his post pretty amusing in terms of wording. I am not PR person or anything but to me the reading of sounds very shill-esque quality.

KajmacJohnson wrote:BTW, I found his post pretty amusing in terms of wording. I am not PR person or anything but to me the reading of sounds very shill-esque quality.

One of the stylistic features of the shill is over-the-top descriptive detail.

As you suggested, the true hallmark is false initial trepidation followed by an epic f*cking "journey" toward becoming an huge fan. Those of us old enough to remember might see the parallel with Penthouse Letters: I'm usually not the type of guy to be into pork belly, but I was in Oak Park after all, so I thought "what the heck." I'll never be the same.

I hope for Seven Ocean's investors' and bank's sake that no one paid for that vomit.

Elden P's review of Seven Ocean has been removed ("filtered") by Yelp, as were two other 5-star reviews by first-time posters (Elden has since written a second review, of Inari Sushi in Elmwood Park).

Any updates on this place? It always seems so uninviting (or mysterious?) when I walk by, so I've never taken a dip, so to speak.

You know what is funny is there was a restaurant (which shall remain nameless) that had the most annoying deco chairs. They only had three legs. Who ever came up with that concept should be shot. The floor of the restaurant was covered in slippery ceramic tile, and you had to just barely shift your weight the wrong way to send the chair flying out from under you (which I did). One day I saw a friend of mine limping down the street, I asked what happened, and he replied that he was in a restaurant with a wobbly table. When he bent forward to place a matchbook under the table leg, his chair flew out from under him. It took me just one guess to figure out which restaurant he was talking about. While I was dining there, at least two other people fell out of their chairs. Last time I went there, I noticed the chairs all now had four legs as the Godess meant them to be.