Montreal's No. 1 restaurant on Tripadvisor didn't really exist
CBC
Yoo Jeung has been running Le Spot St-Denis, at the corner of Duluth Avenue 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 often ask her for directions to restaurants.
"But Nouveau Duluth? No," she said — and something 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 ceilings ... 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 example of how easy it is to create buzz with no substance behind it — and what challenges real restaurants face getting noticed in the algorithm.
The page was taken down after CBC sent a request for a response from Tripadvisor. The popular travel site responded saying stunts that create a fake restaurant listing are "uncommon occurrences and do not share the characteristics of genuine instances of fraud."
"On this occasion, a failure in human moderation practices meant the fake listing remained live on the platform longer than it should have. The listings — including the reviews and photos associated with the listing — are now inactive."
For a restaurant to be listed 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 only a single review on Tripadvisor — 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 Deschamps, whose name is linked to the restaurant's listed phone number. CBC confirmed the phone uses iMessage.
When CBC checked Quebec's registrar of companies, Le Nouveau Duluth was not listed. The location pin leads to the corner of Duluth Avenue and St-Denis Street, but no restaurant named Le Nouveau Duluth is in sight.
CBC asked four neighbouring businesses if they'd ever heard of Le Nouveau Duluth, including Le Spot St-Denis. All said no.