Could TripAdvisor have saved us from Turin's nightmare pizzeria?
Could TripAdvisor have saved us from Turin's nightmare pizzeria?

Video: Could TripAdvisor have saved us from Turin's nightmare pizzeria?

Video: Could TripAdvisor have saved us from Turin's nightmare pizzeria?
Video: SEE NAPLES AND DIE (Italy) 2024, March
Anonim

Poor pizza, raw sausage and the croquettes were not there. I threw up the same evening”. When we read such a review on Tripadvisor, we obviously don't take it literally.

We consider it a colorful poetic license from a Sunday "reviewer" with the ambitions of a keyboard comedian.

Drowned in the mare magnum of the other reviews, both negative and positive, we simply place it in the "bad" section of our mind and move on to the next one, which may have a completely different content, such as: "Clean place, very good pizza with a great availability of tastes ", and which will then end up in the" good "section.

At the end of our investigation we will do the usual sum between good and bad, we will put some personal flair and we will discover that perhaps TripAdvisor it didn't help, because the bad section had practically the same weight as the good section.

Indeed, we will perhaps give even less weight to the reviews to poison, bearing in mind the perfidious pleasure that many of us feel in anonymously crushing online restaurants by showing off (never proven) gastronomic expertise.

Instead, in this particular case, the above review should really have been taken literally; the restaurant's cuisine was truly nightmare: filthy refrigerators with rancid foods and thrown in bulk, yellowed mozzarella left in the air, cakes frozen covered with ice e not protected by anything, potato sacks stored under a shed in contact with old shoes and tires, expired fish, but above all dirt, filth, filth and filth everywhere.

This is what was found in front of the Police Administrative of the Turin Police Headquarters after a check at the “Napule è” pizzeria, in corso Trapani 190 in Turin, whose owner, 73 years old, Italian, was reported for commercial fraud.

A pizzeria of horrors hidden behind a facade of apparent anonymity and behind ordinary, typical TripAdvisor reviews.

yellowed mozzarella
yellowed mozzarella
warehouse
warehouse

And right here, in these “typical” reviews, lies the biggest problem of the tool that many of us can no longer do without before going to a new place, TripAdvisor.

The negative reviews of the pizzeria we are talking about are wasted, so much so that, in addition to the one above, you could read other useful information, such as:

“Chaotic and badly organized venue. Average pizza, but probably made with not very healthy ingredients because my girlfriend and I both had trouble digesting it. We will not go back and I do not recommend it”, or“stale zeppole that tasted like cheese gone bad. Eaten in the room with a musty smell. Really eaten but really BUT REALLY BAD !! Terrible! incomprehensible how someone gave a good evaluation to this place….

Simple, straightforward comments, which did not indulge in easy jokes and certainly did not aim at media consensus, and therefore worthy of greater consideration.

Too bad, however, that, mixed with these reviews, there were several that sounded quite differently, praising the goodness of the pizza served and the professionalism of the staff.

So how to extricate yourself in the forest of reviews ”, personal opinions, questionable tastes, fake comments And personal moods?

What reliability can we give to what we find written on TripAdvisor if with every good review we find as many of the opposite sense, in an indistinct tide that is not always so disinterested?

In this case, only now, in retrospect, can we say that the negative reviews were more than justified and not the result of a bad day by the reviewer or the cook himself, but how could we have said it irrefutably a priori?

Furthermore, even if it had been decided to give more weight to negative reviews because they predominate over the others, how could one have imagined a reality of degradation and neglect that went far beyond the incompetence of the chef on duty?

A bad pizza, a softened fried dish, a plate of pasta with sour sauce do not automatically refer us, perhaps due to an unconscious sense of self-defense, to expired or badly stored ingredients or to the non-observance of the most elementary rules of hygiene.

There are few cases in which horror - and filth - can actually overflow making us ring an alarm bell, as we should have done in this case when reading that, between a pizza and a plate of pasta, the unfortunate person on duty "had the very bad experience of finding a live snail in a pizza ".

In short, TripAdvisor seems to suffer from the so-called "information overload": the information is there, and often also useful and truthful, but we don't realize it, or rather we don't recognize the function they should have: that of informing.

We read them as we would attend a piece of cabaret, to have a laugh with the wittiest ones or scandalize ourselves with the more poisonous ones, giving them the same value as the news read on "Who" or "Real Chronicle" while we are waiting at the hairdresser: a solace, a pastime to make us smile, nothing more.

And while we smile, the vile restaurateur, rubbing his hands, thinks “laugh, laugh, that your mother made the gnocchi…”. With foot-flavored potatoes, of course.

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