How to find the worst restaurant in your city on TripAdvisor

If you’re going out to eat and don’t want to have a good time, it might be hard to figure out where to go. The most data-backed way to do this is to check out Yelp, Google Reviews, or TripAdvisor. However, these platforms don’t support targeted harassment of local small businesses, so “worst restaurants in your city” isn’t a search option.

But, I have found a workaround for this in TripAdvisor.

1. Go to TripAdvisor and choose venue type and city, for example, ‘Restaurant’ in New York. Then, make sure the reviews are sorted by ‘highest rating.’

2. Scroll down to the bottom to navigate pages. Instead of spending hours moving page by page, you want to do this: Right-click on the ‘Next’-button and choose ‘Inspect.’

3. The console pops up. You should automatically find yourself located in the button’s code, which is the only thing you need for this trick. In ‘data-offset,’ you change the value to whichever rank you want to check out.

In this case, we want to look at number 7500 — press enter.

4. With the new code in place, press the ‘Next’-button. Using this trick, you are now free to roam up and down your hometown’s venue rankings. Of course, you can use this trick on the ‘Previous’-button as well if you need to go back again.

Tip: You don’t want to go to the last page because that’s where the venues with no reviews are; you want to be a few pages before that. The location of this point will vary from city to city, but you can usually find it in a couple of tries. Keep in mind that the TripAdvisor rating is not solely based on the average sum of reviews but multiple metrics. This means that the lowest-ranked restaurant might be an unremarkable restaurant with a single review of one star. You usually have to go back even further to find the sweet spot; a stinker with 10+ reviews, most of which are bad.

While this isn’t as straightforward as I would have wanted, it still beats the laborious alternative method.

Be kind while exploring your local disaster businesses. Give them a chance to prove their terrible reviews wrong. But if they deserve another 1-star, at least you know where to find them.