Anthony Bourdain Seriously Despised A Popular Restaurant Reviewing Website

Anthony Bourdain was always known for his outspoken personality, both when it came to his appreciation for things he enjoyed, like the Waffle House breakfast chain, and when it came to things he generally detested, like the many inauthentic food trends of the 2010s. However, one thing above all else that Bourdain was quick to push back against was modern food critics and the websites and guides that housed them, such as Yelp, a website he was not afraid to verbally attack whenever he was given the chance to do so.

The most notable of Anthony Bourdain's slams of Yelp came in 2017 when he spoke with Business Insider about the website and phone application. In this discussion, Bourdain lamented how much Yelp and its user base worsened restaurant culture as it became more popular. "There's really no worse, or lower human being than an elite Yelper," Bourdain expressed, "They're universally loathed by chefs everywhere. They are the very picture of entitled, negative energy. They're bad for chefs, they're bad for restaurants."

Now, while the company itself was founded in 2004, Yelp's popularity and notoriety became far more apparent throughout the 2010s, making Bourdain's annoyance with the site all the more timely. The chef continued to express just how much people in the restaurant industry disliked the app at the time, saying, "I think you'd have a very hard time finding a chef who has anything nice to say about elite Yelpers. It's a contradiction of terms ... How can you be elite and a Yelper?"

Now, Bourdain's disdain for the website is far from his first venomous take on institutions of food criticism, as he famously had scathing remarks about Michelin stars and how they were given out two years prior. However, Bourdain was not one to dislike every form of food criticism on the internet. In fact, the "Parts Unknown" host actually expressed an understanding of social media users who use websites to express their thoughts on different restaurants and cuisines. "I'm perfectly happy with Instagram and Twitter as a fully democratic bathroom wall that anyone can write on." Bourdain explained, "It's up to us ... to winnow out useful information that we might use in a sensible way from this seemingly chaotic yet democratic scrawl put up by many different people."