Montreal's No. 1 restaurant on Tripadvisor didn't really exist

Yoo Jeung has been run‐ ning Le Spot St-Denis, at the corner of Duluth Av‐ enue and St-Denis Street for 22 years. Her flower shop is supposedly right next to the top-rated restaurant in Montreal on Tripadvisor, Le Nouveau Duluth, but she says she's never heard of it.

She says she knows the area very well and tourists of‐ ten ask her for directions to restaurants.

"But Nouveau Duluth? No," she said — and some‐ thing about the online listing seemed off to her.

"There's a very high ceiling [in the photos]," she said. "On Duluth there are no high ceil‐ ings ... it looks fake."

The restaurant was at the number one spot in the travel app's city ratings, but one look at its listing was enough to give pause to foodies.

Le Nouveau Duluth does not exist but the ease with which it rose to the top of a travel advice site is a clear ex‐ ample of how easy it is to cre‐ ate buzz with no substance behind it — and what chal‐ lenges real restaurants face getting noticed in the algo‐ rithm.

The page was taken down after CBC sent a request for a response from Tripadvisor. The popular travel site re‐ sponded saying stunts that create a fake restaurant listing are "uncommon occurrences and do not share the charac‐ teristics of genuine instances of fraud."

"On this occasion, a failure in human moderation prac‐ tices meant the fake listing re‐ mained live on the platform longer than it should have. The listings — including the reviews and photos associat‐ ed with the listing — are now inactive."

For a restaurant to be list‐ ed on Tripadvisor, it has to provide a phone number and a website. The linked URL on Le Nouveau Duluth's didn't lead to an active site.

Le Nouveau Duluth has 85 reviews, all of them giving five stars.

The top review is titled "Can't believe this place really exist." Most reviewers left on‐ ly a single review on Tripadvi‐ sor — for Le Nouveau Duluth.

The listing had just four photos: two showing what looks like a living room, one of a sports bar and the last of comedian Charles De‐ schamps, whose name is linked to the restaurant's list‐ ed phone number. CBC con‐ firmed the phone uses iMes‐ sage.

When CBC checked Que‐ bec's registrar of companies,

Le Nouveau Duluth was not listed. The location pin leads to the corner of Duluth Av‐ enue and St-Denis Street, but no restaurant named Le Nou‐ veau Duluth is in sight.

CBC asked four neighbour‐ ing businesses if they'd ever heard of Le Nouveau Duluth, including Le Spot St-Denis. All said no.

CBC also called the num‐ ber listed on the Tripadvisor page but received no re‐ sponse.

'Easy to spot' fakes Though he's never en‐ countered a fake restaurant on Tripadvisor, cybersecurity expert Terry Cutler says fake reviews are relatively easy to spot.

"If you look at the reviews, a lot of the time they're so vague, like 'Great job,' 'Keep it up,' it has nothing to do with what the review is about," he said.

"If you start seeing noth‐ ing but five-star reviews — there's never any negative comments — that should be a sign that there's something wrong."

LISTEN: How the investi‐ gation unfolded:

Cutler says it's easy for anyone to subscribe to a bot service and flood websites like Google or Tripadvisor with fake reviews and climb the ranks — to the detriment of legitimate businesses.

"So if you really have a good five-star restaurant that's in the rankings, now it's going to get deranked be‐ cause this fake restaurant is taking over," he said.

Graziella Battista, owner of Restaurant Graziella in Old Montreal, says listings like Le Nouveau Duluth are "unac‐ ceptable."

"Of course it's worrisome. People who travel rely on these sites that review restau‐ rants and any type of place that tourists visit," she said.

Battista pointed out that, not that long ago, restaurants earned their ratings from es‐ tablished restaurant critics like "the Lesley Chestermans, and all the Marie-Claude Lor‐ ties".

She also mentioned a gov‐ ernment system that classi‐ fied establishments with qual‐ ity assessments. Now, she says, that responsibility has

been handed over to online platforms where "everyone's an expert."

She says these websites need more regulation so real restaurants don't get pushed down in rankings.

Quebec's Ministry of Tourism says it has no plan to regulate online restaurant rankings or to introduce a credible ranking system for tourist attractions.

"It's a scam," Battista said of Le Nouveau Duluth. "You can tell when you go on their page and it's number one in Montreal out of 3,670 restau‐ rants."

She says it's getting harder and harder to trust informa‐ tion online.

"In the features, they do everything: they deliver, they do takeout, reservations, out‐ door seating, buffet, private dinings, private parking, they have a full bar, wine and beer, waterfront, live music, jazz bar, it's a drive-through, they're on the beach, they have a playground."

WATCH | When newspa‐ per restaurant critics reigned supreme: