Geno D’s Pizza | Facebook

Feb. 15. Yelp’s 10th anniversary list of Top 100 US restaurants includes one Charlotte eatery, one from Greensboro and one from Charleston, SC.

The crowd favorite in the Charlotte region is Geno D’s Pizza in the Market at 7th Street, Charlotte’s energetic food hall and retail space. In Greensboro, the crowd favorite is Freeman’s Grub & Pub, an unassuming gastropub near UNC-Greensboro. The crowd favorite in Charleston is Boxcar Betty’s, a casual spot with a build-your-own menu of antibiotic-free and cage-free chicken sandwiches. (They have three restaurants in and around Charleston as well as a Charlotte location.)

There were no Charlotte-area restaurants on Yelp’s Top 100 list last year.

Background

Yelp is the San Francisco-based company that developed the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about a wide array of businesses including restaurants. The reviews—244 million in 2021—are from real people, not pseudo-journalist/food critics looking for advertising revenues. Think of it as a people’s choice award, not the Michelin guide.

Yelp’s algorithms are trained to sort out particularly suspect reviews, but it’s still a good idea to take everything with a pinch of salt.

The No. 1 slot nationwide goes to Broken Mouth, a Hawaiian-Korean cafe in Los Angeles. It’s earned 5 stars across more than 1,000 reviews Yelp reviews.