Credit: Forbes Magazine
Oobah Butler is a young journalist from Dulwich, a London suburb. Like many freelancers he has a lot of imagination and little pocket money, and he supplements his meager income by writing fake reviews on TripAdvisor: restaurant owners give him £10 to extol the wonders of dishes he has never tasted at dinners he has never had.
When he realizes that his posts raise the star-ratings of the reviewed establishments, a light bulb goes on in his head. So he locked himself in the shed (shed in English) in Dulwich, in the backyard of his house, and “The Shed At Dulwich,” the best restaurant in London, was born.
“One day,” Butler says, "in the face of the current cloaca of misinformation and the tendency to believe the biggest rubbish, I asked myself: could a fake restaurant be successful? That's when my mission began. With the help of fake reviews, ambiguity and nonsense I would turn my house, a garden shed, into a stellar restaurant."
So in April 2017 Oobah registers the restaurant on TripAdvisor; it marks the street but not the house number, because it is an exclusive place, where you eat only by reservation. Then he puts up an elegant site, with lots of inviting photos of delicious dishes on the menu. The great thing is that they are actually compositions made from colored sponges, discs of washing machine detergent and shaving foam.
Dozens of enthusiastic customer reviews begin arriving at Tripadvisor, all sent in by Butler's friends and acquaintances, and “The Shed at Dulwich” begins its irresistible rise up the list of London's best restaurants.
Reservation requests pour in, even months in advance; the answer for all is the same: all full until 2021. Chefs and waiters send out resumes, trade journals unsuccessfully try to schedule interviews with the owners. And in November 2017 The shed at Dulwich takes the top spot: it is the best restaurant in London for TripAdvisor.
The next day Butler contacts the portal and tells all. The page is removed. The latest reviews, however, are true: to close on a high note, Oobah actually opened the restaurant in his garden for one night.
The guests, a television crew, were led into the semi-darkness of the garden equipped as best as a diner, ate with great gusto pre-cooked food plated in the manner of great chefs, and left satisfied, confirming that yes, that was indeed the best restaurant in London.
