I Ate My Way Through Berlin's Most Review-Deleted Restaurants
A tour of the Berlin foot spots that are the most aggressive about their Google reputation, from Risa Chicken to Lezzet Grill.
Hungry in Berlin? Chances are you’re opening Google Maps. For better or for worse, the platform has become the city’s default dining guide. We use it to decide where to get dinner, where to take visitors, and whether that suspiciously empty restaurant around the corner deserves a chance. A few tenths of a star — or a “this meal ruined my day” — can be the difference between walking through the door or continuing down the street.
Earlier this year, Google quietly introduced a feature in Germany that shows how many reviews a business has had removed for defamation-related reasons over the past 365 days. The number appears directly on a business’s profile, ranging from one to 250+ removals. While Germany has already found responsible for 99.7% of review removals across the EU, the new feature is the first time consumers have been able to pointedly see, at least in part, how frequently individual businesses are challenging their reviews.
The response to this update was immediate. Websites like Review Proof and Real Map Review sprang up to track businesses with the highest number of removed reviews. Reddit threads filled with screenshots as Berliners compared notes and traded theories about restaurants they suspected had been pruning negative reviews for years.
In Berlin, many of the restaurants removing the most reviews are among the city’s most recognisable names: Amrit, Hasir, Risa Chicken, Einstein Kaffee — the kinds of places Berliners have been arguing about for years. They may not be known for serving the city's best food, but visiting them is arguably as much a Berlin rite of passage as drinks at Admiralsbrücke or karaoke at Mauerpark: something you do once and might not feel compelled to repeat.
With Google now revealing how many reviews businesses have successfully challenged, I found myself wondering what was hidden behind those numbers. If a restaurant has had hundreds of reviews removed, does that point to a genuinely bad dining experience, a particularly litigious owner, or something else entirely? To find out, I spent a long weekend eating my way through some of Berlin's most review-deleted restaurants.
Don’t eat here even if you’re desperate for food. Preferable to buy yourself an IV drip.”