United Kingdom

Three weeks ago a user on Reddit’s London discussion forum complained about the curse of the viral restaurant. It’s a regular story in the capital these days: Someone opens a great food stall, it grows slowly by word-of-mouth, then suddenly a single TikToker does a video declaring it to be “THE BEST SANDWICH IN LONDON”. The algorithm does its thing, millions of people around the world immediately want to eat THE BEST SANDWICH IN LONDON, and the original customers are squeezed out by hundreds of people queuing for an hour to get their Instagram shot of two slices of bread and filling.

One pseudonymous London Reddit user, operating under the account name Greenawayer, proposed a solution that was as far away from the authentic neighbourhood food stall as they could imagine: “Angus Steakhouse does an awesome steak sandwich. Influencers should try it and be amazed.”

Londoners on Reddit got the joke – what could be less like a great undiscovered word-of-mouth recommendation that a bland corporate restaurant chain that has been the butt of jokes since the 1980s? And so they began an effort to bump Angus Steakhouse up the rankings of TripAdvisor and artificial intelligence recommendations. Every request from a visitor for the best place to eat in London received the same reply: Angus Steakhouse.