Yelp is an online site that reviews businesses and products; Yelp is well known for its restaurant reviews. A Yelp user has been called a “Yelper” since at least July 2007, when Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman admitted in a newspaper article that he used the term.
 
Many restaurants and chefs strongly dislike anonymous Yelp reviews that are negative to their profession. The website Taste Savant (founded in New York City in 2012) aggregates reviews from professional restaurant critics and one’s friends, rather than random strangers on Yelp. Taste Savant’s website declares:
 
“We are the opposite of Yelp.  Yelp will give you 1000 reviews from people you don’t know for 10,000 restaurants in New York.  We give you reviews from people who matter for restaurants that are worth your while.”
 
Taste Savant has been nicknamed the “anti-Yelp.” A similar term for an amateur who reviews restaurants is “Zagateer” (for Zagat.com).
 
   
Wikipedia: Yelp, Inc.
Yelp, Inc. is an American company that operates yelp.com, a local business directory service and review site with social networking features.
 
Yelp.com had more than 100 million monthly unique visitors as of January 2013, up from 71 million on the same time last year. Yelp’s revenue comes from local business advertising.
 
Google News Archive
8 July 2007, The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), “Everybody’s a critic—online” by Seth Sutel (Associated Press), pg. 7E, col. 1:
Jeremy Stoppelman, who founded Yelp in 2004, said he came up with the idea after concluding that word of mouth wasthe best way to find the restaurants he liked. While they may not be professional reviewers, Stoppelman says the sheer volume of information from its users—he calls them “Yelpers”—makes up for the fact there’s not a single, professional editorial voice.
 
Urban Dictionary
yelper
a yelper is a person who provides valuable feedback and insight to local eateries, bars and nightclubs on the website yelp.com.
i yelped (bar/restuarant) a great review because i had a fantastic meal there last night.
or
some yelper gave my bar a crap review last week. i have to find out which server they were talking about!
by torr melling Jan 15, 2008
 
Chicago (IL) Tribune
Yelp’s power grates on wary restaurants
Owners weigh the merits of debating commentators
October 20, 2011|By Christopher Borrelli, Tribune reporter
Luther Lowe is director of business outreach for Yelp . The position was created in 2008, with good reason: Though only a quarter of the website’s user-generated reviews are for restaurants, Yelp had a reputation within restaurant circles as a headache.
(...)
For the last few years, chefs have tried minor retaliation against the hordes of digitally empowered citizen critics, posting unflattering pictures of Yelpers on Yelp, having staff wear shirts scrawled ironically with bad Yelp reviews. But mostly, restaurants have learned to shut up.: When I contacted one restaurant owner about his stance against the site — a Bay Area cafe that posted a “No Yelpers” sticker — he said: “I’ve learned not to talk. When I do, I get horrible reviews.”
 
The Huffington Post
What Chefs Really Think About Yelpers
Joe Satran
First Posted: 02/27/2012 10:59 am Updated: 02/29/2012 4:18 pm
MIAMI BEACH, FLA.—Judging by a panel discussion on “the next generation of diners” at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival on Friday, chefs fall into two camps when it comes to Yelpers: the solicitous and the dismissive.
 
The leader of the dismissive camp was Marc Murphy, of New York’s Landmarc restaurants. He called online reviews—especially those on Yelp—“a lot of noise.”
 
“If I start worrying about that stuff, then that’s another $40,000 employee I have to hire to monitor it,” he explained. “I figure if you don’t respond to them, they’re just gonna go away.”
 
Michelle Bernstein, of local hotspots Sra. Martinez and Michy’s, seemed more willing to negotiate with online reviewers. “Ultimately, we’re in the service industry,” she said, “and I want to make people happy.”
   
Eater
New Dining Site Taste Savant Hopes to Be the ‘Anti-Yelp’
Friday, July 6, 2012, by Greg Morabito
A new NYC-based dining site called Taste Savant went live last week. The goal of the site is to help diners find restaurants and recommend them to friends. From the “about us” page:
 
We curate and aggregate reviews from people you trust including your friends, restaurant critics, bloggers, chefs, and others who know about food. We are the anti-Yelp. Yelp will give you 1000 reviews from people you don’t know for 10,000 restaurants in New York. We give you reviews from people who matter for restaurants that are worth your while.
 
Eater
Taste Savant, the “Anti-Yelp,” Launching in June
Tuesday, May 28, 2013, by Daniel Gerzina
Love it or hate it, there’s no denying the amount of people that head to Yelp for restaurant and bar recommendations. But Taste Savant, a new competitor to Yelp, is about to hit the local market.
 
Already present in New York City, Taste Savant is billed as the “anti-Yelp” in that it aggregates reviews from professional restaurant critics and your friends, rather than random strangers on Yelp, creating two different scores in attempts to determine whether you will like it. The total number of establishments reviewed on the site is far less than Yelp, but they hope to provide more trustworthy reviews instead.