HOW A FAKE RESTAURANT BECAME NUMBER ONE RATED IN LONDON

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
One of the greatest social experiments ever pulled off on
the Internet. He created a fake restaurant on trip Advisor,
no food, no staff, no venue, yet it became number
one in London. The man name is Ubab Butler, a
writer from London, and he once earned about ten pounds

(00:21):
per fake review for restaurants he never visited. But then
an idea hit him. What if he created a completely
fake restaurant and made it the highest rated place in
the city. The goal was to prove how easily the
Internet could be manipulated. He wasn't opening a real business
at all, just building hype, exclusivity and illusion, basically psychological

(00:43):
manipulation of the public. Step one, he created a convincing listing.
He set up a trip Advisor page for a place
called the Shed at Dolwich. It was literally his backyard shed.
He bought a ten dollars burner phone or ten pound
burner phone, marked it as appointment, only listed a vague location.

(01:03):
Now all he needed was food. He improvised by using
bleach tablet as scallops. Some even argued to use this
foot partially as photos as to represent a steak, shaving
foam as whipped cream. And oddly enough, it looked legitimate.
Then came the menu. Every dish was named after an emotion, comfort, empathy, lust.

(01:29):
Then he rallied his friends to post fake five star
reviews and every post mentioned eating outside appointment only, dining, underrated,
hidden gym. Trip Advisor didn't catch on, but the Internet did.
The restaurant began climbing the ranks out of eighteen thousand
restaurants in London. By the second month, that was in

(01:49):
the top fifteen hundred, by the fourth month, top three hundred,
and by the sixth number one month number one in London.
The phone wouldn't stop bringing Butler told everyone they were
fully booked for six weeks. They not made people want
it even more. It's the principle by Jltini of scarcity,

(02:10):
one of the key influation influenced persuasion techniques by Chaldeini
in his book Media asked for interviews. The hype was real,
despite the restaurant being fake, not even being existent. Eventually,
Butler hosted one real dinner his venue, the Backyard. His
guests were ten people. The menu were microwave meals with

(02:32):
random garnishes. They thought it was incredible, and no one
suspected a thing, and December twenty seventeen, Butler revealed everything.
Trip Advisor took the listing down and claimed their systems
generally work, but the damage had already been done. He
had exposed something deeper. People didn't really want good food necessarily.

(02:54):
They craved the status of getting into a place no
one else could. This actually made the food taste even better.
The exclusivity, the mystery, the story being special. Really, if
you look at it, psychological principles of it, it's being special,
something unique. I'm different. That's how a backyard shed outranked

(03:14):
eighteen thousand real restaurants. Perception is more powerful than reality,
and in today's world, hype can beat substance. It's a
great story sells better than the best product.