Toronto restaurant slammed with ‘defamatory’ reviews by angry delivery driver

A long-running Toronto business is asserting that they were the victim of wrongful and defamatory one-star reviews on Google after a disagreement with an Uber Eats delivery person.

For over a decade, Barque BBQ has been a Roncesvalles staple for classic Southern style barbecue and crafty cocktails, but, after a disgruntled delivery driver took out his frustration with what owner David Neinstein calls “defamatory” remarks, the restaurant’s reputation might just be on the line.

So, how did we get here?

Uber Eats deliveries make up about 15 per cent of the restaurant’s topline revenue these days, David tells blogTO, and, in an effort to streamline the pick-up process, he, like many, has developed special instructions for food delivery pick-up drivers.

“[The instruction message the drivers receive on their phones] says ‘no bag, no food, please go to the side door on the side street under the large letter B,’ to guide them to the driver entrance,” David says.

“9 out of 10 drivers simply don’t follow the instructions.”

So, while having a delivery driver show up at the wrong door without an insulated bag (‘no bag, no food’ policies are a quality assurance practice growing more common among restaurants,) is nothing new to David, he still makes a point to correct the drivers when it happens.

“We’re not jerks,” David says. “We don’t assume that everyone’s a driver, so we say ‘hey, hello!’ as if they’re customers and wait for them to identify themselves as drivers.”

The driver in question, though, David says, didn’t respond. He simply held up his phone to show the delivery, to which David asked the driver to go get his bag and meet him at the side door for pick up.

When the driver did come around to pick up the food, David tells blogTO he offered to help the delivery driver put the food in the bag, reminding him to use the delivery entrance next time as the driver departed.

“And I was not snarky, I promise,” David says with a laugh.

In spite of the seemingly peaceful (albeit likely annoying on the side of both parties) interaction, though, David was shocked to find that seven one-star Google reviews had been written about the business within an hour, many accusing the restaurant’s staff of being racist.

Two of Barque BBQ’s negative reviews. 

A couple of the reviews mentioned Uber Eats, so David cross-referenced the reviewers’ names with recent delivery drivers and found out that the driver with whom he’d had the disagreement posted the first review.

“It was clearly the same guy,” David tells blogTO, “and then they had six subsequent reviews all saying we were racist […] and they claimed to be reviewing our lunch Uber deliveries, which we don’t do, so we knew they were clearly false.”

After flagging the reviews to Google (three appear to have been taken down at the time of publication), David went to Uber for support and was disappointed with the response he received.

“We called Uber, we told them what happened and we showed them the proof,” David tells blogTO, “and they said ‘oh, we’re very very sorry, but these are independent contractors and we don’t have a lot of control over them.'”

The solution proposed by Uber, David says, was to make sure that particular driver is never sent to Barque again — but that nothing more could be done beyond that.

“I’m like ‘really? That’s all you’re going to do?'” David says.

“It’s hurtful, because we try so hard to be good,” David tells blogTO, “and it’s defamation, it’s insulting.”

Barque is one of the few restaurants in the city that enforces a no-tipping policy, opting instead to pay his employees liveable wages and, he asserts, that level of respect isn’t limited to only his employees, which made this experience all the more shocking.

As of the time of publication, there have been no further solutions brought forward by Uber (who David calls the “biggest disappointment” of this whole experience,) and a handful of the reviews remain visible on Google, despite being flagged as fraudulent.

This isn’t the first time a Toronto restaurant has been the recipient of so-called ‘review-bombing’ by disgruntled delivery drivers.

Just last year, owners at Leslieville’s TuckShop (now closed) and Danforth restaurant Papyrus found that they were both being targeted by the same person, learning later that it was a DoorDash driver who had stopped by both restaurants.

They, like David, also did not find much success in complaining to either the delivery app or Google.