The Most Effective Way To Weed Out Paid Reviews For Restaurants, According To Korean Food Influencers

It’s a creative hack to know if the review is honest!

It isn’t easy to find good restaurants in a city, especially if you’re weary of fake reviews. If you suffer from this problem, look no further than these tips given by popular Instagram food influencers!

Lee Hye Min and Park Shin Yong are two mukstagramers (mukbang + Instagramers) who have 114,000 and 88,000 followers on Instagram respectively.

Lee Hye Min (left) and Park Shin Yong (right)

In order to recommend restaurants to their followers, they honed their searching skills, and they shared their tips on a recent episode of AYO‘s “Comment Defenders.”

The topic was introduced when they read a comment from a netizen who shared their personal hack when searching for restaurants. According to the netizen, reviews that have swear words are always honest.

When I search for good restaurants, I type in curse words like ‘a good restaurant + f****in.’ Usually, I can get honest reviews with that.

— Korean netizen

Lee Hye Min agreed and added that it becomes even more effective when you add “best restaurant in the region” and “bought with my own money.”

The most searched word we recommend is ‘The best restaurant in the region + f****ing good.’ Or I tend to add ‘Bought with my own money,’ but you can get good results with ‘F****ing good.’

— Lee Hye Min

On the other hand, Park Shin Yong devised a way of knowing if the restaurant sells authentic foreign food. He personally checks if their signboards are written in a language he doesn’t understand.

Chinese restaurant in Korea | The Korea Herald

It gets plus points if there are plants growing around the signboard, suggesting that the restaurant has been loved by patrons for many years.

I tend to trust signboards. For Chinese restaurants, if you write something that you don’t even know without any Korean, it feels like a famous Chinese restaurant. There are plants growing on the signboard? That means the place is old enough for plants to grow. It has been there for a long time without being remodeled.

— Park Shin Yong

If you’re interested in weeding out paid reviews from real ones, try Park Shin Yong and Lee Hye Min’s tips the next time you’re in need of a good restaurant!

In the same interview, they revealed how much they earn from mukstagram. Check it out here:

Korean Food Influencer Admits She Earns Enough To Fly To Japan For A Day…Just To Eat Ramen

Source: YouTube