The Tampa food scene has been rocked with controversy. One woman’s negative Yelp review of a local restaurant turned into a full-blown legal battle when the chef took issue with her critique.
A lengthy feature article published in the Tampa Bay Times, written by Helen Freund, details the saga of Irene Eng, a Yelp Elite reviewer with more than 660 critiques under her belt, whose crime was writing a less-than-glowing 795-word Yelp review of a Chinese fusion restaurant called Hales Blackbrick. The restaurant’s chef and owner, Richard Hales, then sued her over the review.
As user reviews go, Eng’s is no more inflammatory than any other you’d come across online. It’s detailed, sure, but not flagrantly, offensively negative. Just another Yelp reviewer voicing their opinion to add to the pile. Yet Hales sued Eng for “tortious interference” after she reposted her review on Yelp, Google, and TripAdvisor, claiming that it included false statements—all of which, he insisted, caused the restaurant to lose money.
Yelp itself responded by adding a consumer alert on the restaurant’s page warning diners about “legal system abuse.”
The power dynamic between diners and chefs/restaurant owners has shifted. Reviewers like Eng see their reviews as a public service, but whose opinions are not kept in check by the same ethical standards to which a newspaper’s staff food critic must adhere. The world of user-generated online reviews can be a Wild West of inflammatory and sometimes factually incorrect nonsense. Chefs and restaurant owners have to toe the line between professionalism and outright white-hot rage when a new negative review trickles in. The economics of restaurants are so absurd that one bad night and one bad review can tank months or years of effort to whip a restaurant into shape.
While the First Amendment protects reviews, not every restaurateur gives much of a shit about it. Hales says he does. He told Freund and the Tampa Bay Times that he’s “1,000% for freedom of speech,” but sued Eng for using hers to leave a fairly innocuous, inoffensive negative review of his restaurant. Well, inoffensive to everyone other than him.
Diners want to impart their honest perspective to prospective diners. Chefs just want to be treated fairly. In a world where everybody is a potential food critic, a heightened onus is placed on a restaurant’s staff to be at the top of its game every minute of every hectic night. That’s an impossible task, and many chefs understandably want to be cut a little slack.
Most diners will never understand the immense minute-to-minute difficulties of running a restaurant, nor should they have to, necessarily. The restaurant-goer may never understand that they may have been the only person that night to walk away unimpressed with the specific dish they ordered, but that one subpar steak or whatever was enough to lead to a bad review. Chefs, understandably, hate that.
That’s the reality of a publicly facing business, and it’s a reality that can eventually lead to a restaurant losing money should the gods of search engine optimization latch onto that review, and before you know it, that one review is all anybody ever sees.
Hillsborough Circuit Judge Christine A. Marlewski tossed the lawsuit in February 2025, ruling that Hales didn’t prove any of his claims. All he can do now is get back to cooking and serving dishes, hopefully now with the wherewithal to not lose his cool at the next bad Yelp review.
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