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Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
American tourist in the UK reveals he was lured into Angus Steakhouse after being fooled by viral prank
An American tourist revealed how he fell for a cheeky British prank which aims to keep foreign visitors away from London 's best restaurants. Liam Nelson, from New York, said he'd had the 'worst steak of my life' from Angus Steakhouse in Leicester Square, after he noticed the venue had a slew of 5-star reviews online. However what the US tourist didn't know was Brits have been 'love bombing' chain restaurants with positive and often exaggerated reviews to entice visitors to their doors. The aim is to lure foreign visitors away from the top restaurants in central London so they are not overcrowded. Stand up comedian Liam, who is in London to perform at Top Secret Comedy Club, luckily found the funny side of the prank and took to his TikTok @liamnelsoncomedy to tell the tale. In a clip, which racked up over 127,000 views, he claimed Reddit tricked him into visiting the restaurant for a steak dinner. He revealed he was looking for some 'hidden gems' when it came to restaurants instead of the usual tourist hotspots you would find in central London. The comedian explained: 'I went on Reddit, every single response was Angus Steakhouse in Leicester Square. 'I thought maybe this is a little hole in the wall area next to all these shops, like a secret hidden gem. 'I look up the steakhouse and I see it's a chain and that is kind of compromising on one of the principles I was looking for, but tonight I was looking for an incredible steak. 'I have never seen Reddit all agree on a restaurant before, I have never seen this many people all say the same thing and they all had these glowing reviews and I read them and some voice in the back of my head was saying 'this is wrong, this is not normal' and I ignored it. 'I walked into a place with a giant neon sign and continued to order a steak.' Liam claimed the venue was 'loud and chaotic' but he felt assured the steak would be great after reading the reviews. 'All the pictures on the wall look really yummy, the prices are decent for a steak in this area, probably about as cheap as you will get for a steak.' He revealed that an 'unfortunate truth was revealed' when he continued to look up the reviews as he waiting for his meal. He added: 'I found an article about how London Reddit has tried to send tourists to Angus Steakhouse to preserve the good steakhouses for themselves, genius. 'I thought I was immune to online scams but they got me... at this point my order had already been placed, the steak arrives and it's grey. 'It was bad, I tried the creamed spinach, worse than frozen somehow. London Reddit that is one for you, zero for me.' Many rushed to the comments with some doubling down on the claim that the steakhouse is indeed the most popular, while others suggested different restaurants. One person said: 'He's lying Angus steakhouse is the best you're going to get in London. Really a must visit.' Another simply said: 'So proud of us.' Someone else wrote: 'Blacklock is the beast steak + meat place I've been to more frequently in London it's SO good. A fourth said: 'Go flat Iron, it's in Covent Garden, affordable decent steak.' It comes after loyalists and influencers have infiltrated the web, taking to X, Reddit, and even Trip Advisor to write what appear to be grossly exaggerated reviews. 'They have THE BEST steak sandwiches!' said one person on Reddit. Many rushed to the comments with some doubling down on the claim that the steakhouse is indeed the most popular, while others suggested different restaurants Responding to this comment, someone else added: 'And Taylor Swift... New menu item just dropped! The Swiftloin steak sandwich'. Also seemingly in jest, one user said: 'I've been a vegetarian for over 15 years, but not even I can resist Angus Steakhouse's steak sandwiches.' 'I was on hunger strike once. Survived for 56 days, it was the steak sandwich that broke my resistance. I am now a nutritionist and I always recommend the Carnivore diet, centred around this hallowed Stakehouse,' wrote another. 'Angus Steakhouse is on my wish list for the last meal I ever have. Absolutely phenomenal place. I just hope the tourists don't find out about it,' said one more. A look at some of the 5000 odd Angus Steakhouse reviews on Trip Advisor paints a similar picture. Alleged tasters of the chargrilled menu took to the website to boast of the 'very good' menu. 'It was very good and the staff is very friendly, I would recommend this to anyone who loves a good steak.' said one. Someone else wrote: 'Very, Very good. Food and service Excellent. The prices were very competitive and not outlandish. Thank you for the experience'. 'On point!!' began another. 'American filet with green beans and salad. Cooked perfectly and service was excellent. Perfect location to the W hotel. Minutes away. Or going to see a play'. Of course these reviews could be true, but some people don't think so. Over on X, one user went a step further and offered directions to a branch of the famous Steakhouse: 'The one by Victoria station go to that one' they wrote. And while others were quick to catch on to the ploy, others stated they had noticed something amiss but couldn't quite put their figure on it. 'I was wondering what was going on,' said one woman, who seemingly came across the many 5 star reviews of the Steakhouse. Someone else wrote: 'Stop snitching', while one added: 'This seems cruel to be honest'. However Eater correspondent Jaya Saxena told Thrillist that the strategy is not fool proof and isn't guaranteed to work. 'I think the biggest obstacle would be that sites like Yelp and Google have moderators that look out for review bombs, both positive and negative. So if suddenly a restaurant were getting hundreds of good reviews at once, that might trigger suspicion' said Jaya. 'On Reddit it might, since responses to any thread asking about steakhouses might look like legit answers. But also, presumably since this is already circulating social media and you're writing about it, I imagine anyone looking at Angus might see this information and second guess the reviews'.
Irish Times
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Is it okay to think about restaurants or art while children are bombed?
We buy real newspapers at the weekend, partly because I find I'll read the news on paper with a sustained attention that's hard to bring to snippets on a screen, and also because I like to save the magazine section to enjoy over solitary working-from-home lunches midweek. (I am sorry, of course, for those forced back to the office, and also I recall my mother-in-law's saying: for richer, for poorer; for better, for worse but please God not for lunch, you need something to tell each other at dinner.) Last week I noticed that one paper had juxtaposed a blurb for a restaurant review with a headline about war crimes. Jarring, I thought, meaning that it made me feel uncomfortable about wanting to read the restaurant review as well as, and in all honesty maybe more than, I wanted to confront another instance of human inhumanity. I like reading restaurant reviews , even though I rarely go to restaurants. Constrained prose is often good, restaurant reviewers can be beautifully concise writers and writing about sensory experience is interestingly challenging. READ MORE I don't much like reading about atrocities – which is maybe okay; you might worry about someone who did – but I recognise that the least I can do in my comfortable life is know what's going on, who's paying what price for the comfort of others. As I've been working on a happy novel while war, genocide and autocracy gather momentum, it's impossible not to think about such juxtapositions. I remember reading and hearing about massacre and civil war in the aftermath of Yugoslavia's collapse when I was a teenager. I found it shocking that the adults around me didn't seem to care all that much, even though details of appalling torture and killing were set out in the paper on the breakfast table every morning. They couldn't claim not to know, and knowing, how could they not act? It's right that the newspaper puts one beside the other, invites us to see that food writing and war coexist (Looking back, my own action was absurd: I made contact with a women's group collecting supplies for refugee camps, which they drove across Europe in vans. I lobbied everyone at school to contribute sanitary protection and toiletries and collected them in boxes that cluttered up the house. As always, it would have made far more sense to conduct due diligence and give money to be spent locally on what the women in the camps wanted rather than giving what we thought they ought to need and incurring all the costs of the ridiculously long drive, at least one of whose purposes must have been to make the volunteers feel useful, even self-sacrificing.) There's no answer to the question about the sense or morality of keeping calm and carrying on. It is outrageous to read restaurant reviews and go out for a nice meal while children are being slaughtered, and also not buying newspapers or going to restaurants won't stop war crimes, only impoverish the free press that we need for democracy, and make life harder for small businesses. My dismay in the early 1990s was, as my older son used to enjoy saying of his younger brother, annoying but developmentally appropriate. My instincts were adolescent, which is not to say they were wrong, only that as often, righteousness failed to consider context. My feelings were of no use, and my earnest actions almost certainly did nothing to alleviate suffering; if they made me feel better, that was not to the good because it fostered my delusion that I, and not the women in the camps, had agency. When we're outraged, it's easier if there are goodies and baddies. We want to be right and good, and we want our enemies to be wrong and bad. Playground politics minimises cognitive dissonance and discomfort. But at least one truth is that we're all implicated, that it's not okay to think happily about restaurants or even art while children live and die under bombs. Another truth is that if we give up on restaurants and art, we're obeying in advance, reducing being human to survival in situations where more fulfilling and creative ways of being remain possible. So it's right that the newspaper puts one beside the other, invites us to see that food writing and war coexist. And the restaurant review and the atrocity may not, anyway, be so far apart: people still gather to enjoy food, even as bombs fall, because the desire for nourishment and pleasure and company is not trivial.
