The fake restaurant

I want to told this story, if you never heard that, I hope you'll like it.

This was one of the biggest social experiments ever seen online: he created a completely fake restaurant on TripAdvisor. No food, no staff, no venue. And yet it became the number 1 restaurant in London.

Oobah Butler, a London writer, once earned £10 for every fake review he wrote about restaurants he had never set foot in.

Then he had a crazy idea: to invent a restaurant from scratch and make it the highest rated in the city.

His goal? To demonstrate how easy it was to manipulate the internet.

He didn't want to open a real restaurant. He just wanted to create hype, exclusivity and illusion.

Step 1: Create a credible listing.

He created a TripAdvisor page for a restaurant called "The Shed At Dulwich" which was literally his garden shed.

He bought a £10 burner phone. He set it to "reservations only" and gave it a vague location. Now all that was missing was food.

Butler came up with all sorts of ideas, like photographing his foot as if it were a steak and using shaving cream as whipped cream, and many other ideas.

It all seemed strangely real. Then he created a menu where each dish was named after an emotion: comfort, empathy, desire...

He asked his friends to write fake 5-star reviews, all of which talked about: outdoor dining, mandatory reservations, "little hidden gem" atmosphere

TripAdvisor didn't notice anything, the web did.

The restaurant started climbing the rankings of over 18K restaurants.

Month 2: top 1500
Month 3: top 300
Month 6: number 1 overall.

The phone was ringing constantly.

Butler started saying they were booked solid for 6 weeks.

And that made them even more desirable.
Some brands started sending samples.
The media started asking for interviews. The hype was real even if the restaurant wasn't.

Eventually he threw a real dinner. Location, his garden; guests, 10 people; menu, microwave ready meals with random toppings.

Everyone was thrilled. No one suspected anything.

In December 2017 Butler spilled the beans.

TripAdvisor removed the page and said that his systems usually work.

But by then the damage was done. He had exposed something much deeper.

People didn't really care about good food, they wanted to feel privileged, to access a place inaccessible to others.

The exclusivity, the mystery, the story. And that's how a simple garden shed outsold 18K real restaurants.

What did Butler prove? That perception trumps reality.

In today's world, hype trumps quality, a well-told story sells more than the best product.