There's the ongoing meme that the best Chinese restaurants have 3.5 stars on Yelp- from the combination of 5 star reviews from people who love the food, and 1 star from people who didn't like the brusque service or didn't get the American Chinese food they were expecting.
There's a Malaysian/Chinese resto near me like that. It's an absolute sleeper of a place to have eat. Barely visible from the road, and connected to a supermarket (and they wheel in and out shopping carts from next door as they run out of ingredients during the day). My Japanese roommate at the time was turned onto it by his Korean boss, and I took my Chinese/Filipino/Indian/American coworkers there and then they started going there all the time.
The 1 star reviews complain about the organ meat, which there were totally grossed out by. "Beef tendon pho" is super legit, and what you get in Asia. You're in the wrong place if you expect American-Chinese fare.
It's super weird to me that people will leave a bad review because there were things on the menu they didn't like. I like some types of organ meat, and dislike others, but it would never even enter my mind to be like "2 stars because 40% of the menu is stuff I don't like". People are weird.
I have another comment in the thread which got downvoted by someone.
My take, having seen a lot of these posts on yelp, is that people leave such reviews because restaurants are offering something which they are not familiar with, or does not match their notions of "normal" (however narrow that may be). You see this less at restos which serve burgers and pizza, and more with places serving non-American food.
I just took a spin through the couple of Asian places in my town, and they have relatively high numbers of 1 star reviews. Digging into them, what you see a lot of are is complaints like:
"This is the worst Asian food I have ever had because (proceeds to describe exactly how the dish is supposed to be)". Also a lot of complaints about these Asian restaurants being "dirty" (which they aren't - as I'm only reading through places my wife and I go to / order from frequently). It was like this specifically with Asian food in the last town I lived in as well. I recall one complaint about how they romanized a Thai word, insisting "pad see ewe" was misspelled (ORLY!). It's bizarre. Mexican restaurants by comparison, get complaints about the food being too spicy, or the decor (at takeout places no less) being bad. And, of course, "dirty", which again, the places I frequent, aren't.
I can't help but conclude that people who write these reviews are judging things based on their own biases, of which they are not self-aware. A more harmless example is a review from a great Thai/Chinese resto where I used to live where someone suggested the place smelled "musty". Well - it was in a sublevel of a large building ("basement" is the word they used), but it was not in any way musty in the 10 years I spent going there. None of my friends ever took issue, even a good friend with a really sensitive nose.
