Red Flag

19. Filling the Gaps

While Lorne and I enjoyed our leisurely lunch, we worked at filling in the gaps in our awareness of each other's lives, expanding from the glimpses and snippets we had shared during our meetings at events over the years. As I savoured the superb, lingering aftertaste from another sip of the Montrachet, I asked, "How had you become so deeply involved in wine?"

"Inspired and mentored by Dad." He shrugged. "Being an importer and marketer, he presented an everchanging variety of wine on the table with meals, and he delighted in teaching us their backgrounds – where they were grown, how they were made and by whom."

"Did he allow you to taste?"

"Not until we were sixteen. Then only a tiny amount, an ounce and a half in an ISO glass, allowing us to understand his descriptions of aromas, bouquets, mouth feel, taste and aftertaste – teaching us how to assess these and write tasting notes."

Lorne paused to swirl and nose his wine again. "As a high school graduation gift, he took me on a buying trip through Europe, allowing me to put faces to all the people he had talked about over the years. Four fabulous weeks, instilling in me the awareness that fine wine is more than only the geography and the grapes. It's the people behind it – the owners, the viticulturists, the winemakers, the cellar workers and so on."

"Ummm, as Dad always preaches. I took a gap year before university and worked with him in the vineyards and cellar –"

"Hunh? Where was this?"

"Naramata. That's why we had moved to the Okanagan. He bought vineyards and a winery on the Bench."

"Oh, my! Why had you never mentioned this?"

I shrugged. "Didn't want to influence your impartiality. You've always given our wines stellar reviews and plaudits – far better to know they were unbiased."

"Yeah." Lorne blew a deep breath as he patted the phone in his shirt pocket. "And speaking of influence, we should begin digging through the photos of the reviews."

As we dug, Lorne built a computer spreadsheet with restaurants in the columns and reviewers in the rows. Patterns soon emerged, and these assisted our further digging. In a few hours, we had identified twelve restaurants that were obviously playing a game with four newspaper reviewers and twenty-one bloggers.

"Far bigger than I had expected." I shook my head. "No wonder they reacted so swiftly and so heavily."

"Yeah, and we've barely scratched the surface." Lorne pointed at his computer screen. "This is only Vancouver. They likely have similar operations in other major cities across the country."

"And in the smaller ones, as well."

"No, that's unlikely. They seem clever enough to realise this needs a large base of diners to dupe. Some will blindly accept the quality as being what's touted in the reviews, enjoying the salt and grease, the familiar hook of the pubs and burger chains. But the more discerning diners will relate quality to price and move on."

"Umm, and those must be replaced by a steady stream of new dupes, thus the need of a large population."

"Exactly. But more of a problem is that the restaurants are doing nothing illegal with this."

I snapped my head to stare at him. "What? It's clearly bait and switch."

"Indeed, which is illegal under the Competition Act." Lorne shrugged. "But they're not doing a bait and switch, and this is more of their cleverness. The restaurants don't offer the bait; the bloggers do that for them."

"With reviews influenced by the restaurants."

"The Courts would see these as being reviews of complimentary meals, allowing the restaurants' arguments that the bloggers had chosen to review the gratuitous ones, rather than those from unannounced dining."

"Insidious."

"Indeed, very clever. And with the lure of ongoing free upscale dining, the bloggers continue the ruse – either blindly, blithely or complicit."

"So, how do we stop this?"

"Look for prosecutable illegal activity."

"Like what?"

"Find out if and how they're causing restaurants to fail. Investigate mysterious disappearances and deaths to see if any others can be linked to the restaurants."

I winced and nodded. "What about fraudulent reviews on the dining sites?"

"Those can be argued as being opinions."

"Unless there are patterns of obvious bias that can be linked to the restaurants."

Lorne stroked his bearded chin, bobbing his head. "Or to a central point, a common source."

I pointed to his spreadsheet. "Would it make sense to scan through the dining review sites, TopTable, Yelp, Tripadvisor, and so on? See if we can connect any of the bloggers to comments there."

"Or comb through the involved restaurant entries on those sites, search for patterns and –."

"Better, still. Comb through the comments on the failed restaurants and relate them to comments on their reincarnations."

"And check the recent ownership history of the restaurants we've identified. See if any more of them are revamped versions of failed places."

I tilted my head in question. "How would we do that?"

"City business license records, land-title database, Provincial corporate filings, accounts of bankruptcy proceedings, changes in GST and PST returns, FoodSafe registration changes, applications for City Health inspection, and on and on."

"Oh, God! You rattle these off as if it's routine."

"No, only mentioning possibilities as they flash through my mind."

"So, what's our next step?"

Lorne closed his computer and stood, sweeping me up off the couch and into his arms. "Us. Cuddle time."