I may speak for myself but the grand majority of my experiences with restaurants is most of them do a totally passable job, many very good for their price point in my opinion. Of course there’s levels to it but its food and having a decent restaurant should be far from herculean. This article is essentially suggesting that making it in the world of restaurants is like anything else: it hinges a lot on luck and circumstance.

And as an additional personal note, I can tell you that in Michigan I went to many smaller restaurants with one or two bad reviews that were great. If you actually read the bad reviews, you often see some utterly ridiculous shit.

I don't use review apps like yelp. My personal experience is there's a weak correlation at best between my experience and the average rating.

I check the reviews in Google Maps since they’re there anyways, but I don’t use them as a guide. I used to use Yelp as a guide but stopped when I realized how lackluster it was for that, and I assume that applies to probably any rating system where anyone can submit a review.