Is there anything better than a home-cooked meal? Apparently not, if you believe Yelp.
This small project examines the language people use to describe food in Yelp reviews. We looked at more than 100,000 reviews and extracted phrases where people said their food “tasted like” something else.
For each word or phrase used in these descriptions, we averaged the “star” ranking of all the reviews it was used in. This lets us see which descriptions have positive and negative associations.
The results reflect a strong preference for food that appears authentic, or reminds people of events in their life. Words like home cooking, grandma, and childhood are almost universally positive.
On the other hand, words that indicate pre-prepared or packaged food, like TV dinner and Campbell's are used most consistently in bad reviews. In fact, they averaged a lower rating than clearly off-putting descriptions like chlorine and cardboard.
You can explore the words below or read the full blog post.
