Sometimes the restaurant of dreams risks remaining that way. This is the case of Oscar's, a romantic fishing boat transformed into a refined place where you can taste French food. A fantastic, "divine" place, to use the words of Tripadvisor, the king of travel web portals. Too bad Oscar's only exists in the wild imagination of some prankster.
The latest big online hoax comes from where you least expect it. Tripadvisor, an Internet site considered by the most reliable, consulted by almost all aspiring travelers looking for useful advice on where to sleep and eat, has published a series of reviews of a place that doesn't exist, Oscar's.
If it existed, Oscar's would be located on New Quay Lane in Brixham in the UK. And it deserves even a Michelin star, according to the enthusiastic words of its more than hypothetical customers. The two delightful founders – Alfredo and Colette – would receive you on board the floating restaurant, which would leave its moorings during the appetizer. The waiters - and here it borders on the surreal - would be dressed as a diver, snorkel included, and at your request "I would like an hour", they would jump into the water to go and recover it, with a very effective synthesis of "zero kilometer food" and “freshness on the plate”. Oscar's has thus become – and here the conditional must be removed because this is the only verifiable fact – the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the British city.
The author of the joke responds to the name of Oscar Parrot. At least that's the online identity – equally improbable, considering that in English it sounds like “Oscar the Parrot” – of the author of all the Oscar's reviews.
Parrot is none other than a restaurateur particularly angry with Tripadvisor, which has decided to reveal its risks and unreliability. The hotel of some of his friends - this time real - received tons of negative comments on the site, according to him written by the competition.
The false reviews, despite some timid comments from disappointed patrons who found a wall instead of the restaurant at the address indicated, remained on the portal for almost three months. Too many for a site like Tripadvisor, which sees its users' trust collapsing. And the British media is already going wild. The Independent renames it "Trapadvisor", the site that recommends traps, while the Guardian comes to speak of "headache holidays".
Oscar's scam was just the last straw in an already pretty full jar. Users are increasingly critical of site choices and, above all, aware of the fact that reliability is less and less common in those parts. Tripadvisor, for its part, let it be known that they carry out many checks, but the number of reviews is a flood that makes the undertaking difficult. Meanwhile, Alfredo and Colette continue to wait for us on New Quay, Lane in Brixham. You can easily recognize them, even if there are no descriptions on Tripadvisor: they are the protagonists of Ratatouille, the Disney film about gourmet mice.
