HOAX CUISINE!
Prankster who claimed his garden shed was a trendy eaterie topped TripAdvisor
WOULD you believe it? The hippest city dining spots can crop up in the most unlikely of spaces.
So when a restaurant based in a garden shed promised gastronomic heaven on a plate, it quickly became the hottest place to eat in London.
Helped by a string of glowing commendations, it shot straight to the top of the rankings on TripAdvisor – even leapfrogging venues with Michelin stars. The only problem was the reviews were all fake – and the restaurant nothing but the invention of a mischievous writer.
Oobah Butler, 26, set up a phoney website for the outhouse in his garden, calling it The Shed at Dulwich – and fooled hundreds of potential customers into trying to book a table.
His prank echoes a 2015 Irish Mail on Sunday exposé of the faulty TripAdvisor system in which our sister paper cooked up a fake restaurant that quickly became the No.1 restaurant in Roscommon on the ratings website despite it having a fake facebook page, fake telephone number and a fake address.
To add authenticity to his prank, Mr Butler concocted a social media profile and took artistic shots of the ‘food’ – created with household items including shaving foam, bleach tablets, paint and even the author’s foot.
His menu, served outside to diners on wooden tables, consists of meals defined by ‘moods’ such as ‘contemplation’, ‘empathetic’ and ‘comfort’.
Mr Butler bought a cheap mobile to register phone bookings and said it rang ‘incessantly’ for months with customers keen to bag a table. It took six months – and 83 fake reviews – to make the phoney venue London’s best restaurant. Explaining his idea on news website Vice, Mr Butler said: ‘This convinced me that TripAdvisor was a false reality. Restaurant owners would pay me £10 and I’d write a positive review of their place, despite never eating there. Their fortunes would genuinely turn, and I was the catalyst.’
TripAdvisor said it uses ‘stateof-the-art technology to identify suspicious review patterns’.