This is a story about an eighty-two-year-old man who has spent the past two years writing detailed, deeply evocative Yelp reviews for restaurants in cities he has never visited, how his granddaughter discovered this, and what she has decided to do about it.
The eighty-two-year-old — I will call him Salvatore, because he chose the name himself, and because when his granddaughter asked him why, he said, in her account, “It was going to be the name of my son, if my son had turned out to be a son, which he did not, which is fine” — is a retired refrigeration mechanic. He lives in a small condominium in a suburb of Miami. He has been retired for seventeen years. He was married to his wife Ilana for fifty-two years. She passed away in 2021.
He has, since the spring of 2024, been posting to Yelp under a username his granddaughter would prefer I not reveal.
He has posted seventy-three reviews.
None of them are true.
The discovery
The discovery — which was made by Salvatore’s granddaughter, who I will call Delfina, and who spoke with me at length over the course of three conversations — happened on a Sunday afternoon in early May.
Delfina, who is thirty-four and lives in Chicago, was planning a trip. She was going, with her partner, to San Sebastián — a small city in northern Spain that Delfina has told me she had wanted to visit for approximately eleven years. She was researching restaurants. She was, at 3:47 p.m. on a Sunday, on Yelp, reading reviews of a small Basque restaurant she had been considering for their first dinner in the city.
The third review on the page was, according to Delfina, “the best paragraph I have ever read about a restaurant in my life.”
I have, with Delfina’s permission and with Salvatore’s, read the review. It is one hundred and forty-two words long. It describes, in careful and specific detail, the light coming through the front window of the restaurant at 8:15 p.m. It describes the sound of a specific waiter greeting a regular customer. It describes the way the pintxos are arranged on the bar — the small architectural discipline of them, the deliberate progression from lightest to darkest, the way the anchovies always sit at the far end nearest the window. It describes a specific dish, txipirones en su tinta, in a way Delfina has told me made her cry.
She has told me the crying was, at that moment, unrelated to the fact that she recognized the writing.
She has told me the crying began when she recognized it.
She has told me that she scrolled up to the top of the review, and looked at the reviewer name, and understood — in what she has described to me as “one long slow second” — that the review had been written by her grandfather.
The username
The username, which Salvatore chose in 2024 and which he has used for all seventy-three reviews, is one Delfina has asked me not to reveal. I will say only that it consists of two words. The first word, according to Delfina, is a proper noun. The second word, according to Delfina, is a small joke that would only be funny to their family.
She has told me that the moment she saw the username, she was completely certain who had written the review. She has told me that in the entire world, there is only one person who would use those two words together as a name for himself.
She has told me she had not, before that moment, known her grandfather used Yelp.
She has told me she had not, before that moment, known her grandfather traveled.
She has told me: “My grandfather has not, at any point in the past eleven years, left the Miami metropolitan area.”
The next several hours
Delfina, once she had recovered from the initial shock, did what any reasonable person in her position would do. She clicked on the username. She was taken to her grandfather’s Yelp profile.
The profile contained seventy-three reviews. Every one of them was for a restaurant outside of Florida. Approximately half were for restaurants in the United States — small places in Portland, Oregon; New Orleans; Butte, Montana; a diner in Bemidji, Minnesota. The other half were international. There were reviews for restaurants in Lisbon, Naples, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Reykjavík. There were, according to Delfina’s later count, reviews from twenty-seven countries.
The reviews were, on average, one hundred and twenty words long. Some were shorter. A few were longer. All of them, in Delfina’s assessment, were exceptional.
The reviews included specific details. Names of dishes. Names of waiters. Names of streets nearby. Weather conditions. The music playing over the speakers. The color of the walls. In one review, for a small ramen shop in Osaka, Salvatore described in careful detail a small dog that had, apparently, been sitting under one of the tables during his visit — a small dog with a red collar and a white patch on its left ear. In another review, for a bakery in a specific arrondissement of Paris, he described a conversation he had, in French, with the woman behind the counter about the difference between two different kinds of butter.
Salvatore does not speak French.
Salvatore has not, in seventeen years of retirement, left the country.
Salvatore, as far as Delfina has been able to determine, has not eaten in a restaurant that requires reservations since 2019.
Delfina spent, that afternoon, approximately three hours reading his reviews.
The confrontation
I want to be careful about calling what happened next a confrontation, because Delfina has told me it was not, in her experience, a confrontation. It was a conversation. She flew, the following weekend, to Miami. She sat with her grandfather in his kitchen. She showed him her phone.
She said: “Papi, I found your Yelp.”
Salvatore, according to Delfina, did not immediately respond. He looked at the phone. He looked at her. He then, slowly, in the way she has told me he does when he is thinking, folded his hands on the kitchen table.
He said: “Ah.”
Delfina said: “Papi. You have been writing reviews of restaurants you have never been to.”
Salvatore said: “Yes.”
Delfina said: “For two years.”
Salvatore said: “Yes. About two years.”
Delfina said: “Papi. Why.”
Salvatore, in what Delfina has told me was one of the more moving moments of her life, thought about the question for what she timed at approximately forty seconds. Then he said, in Delfina’s account:
“Because your grandmother and I were going to go.”
Delfina said: “To all of them?”
Salvatore said: “To some of them. We had a list. It was in a small book. I have the book still. She had made it. We were going to start, when I retired, in Paris, and then work our way out from there.”
Delfina said: “You never went.”
Salvatore said: “We were not able to. I retired later than she had wanted me to. Then she got sick. Then the pandemic. Then she was sicker. Then she was gone.”
Delfina said: “But Papi. Why write about them if you have not been.”
Salvatore said: “Because if I write about them, I have been.”
He said: “It is not a good answer. But it is my answer.”
The book
Salvatore has, at Delfina’s request, allowed me to see the book.
The book is small. Perhaps six inches by four. It is a paperback notebook of the kind sold in stationery stores in the 1990s. It has a soft blue cover. Inside, in Salvatore’s late wife Ilana’s handwriting, are approximately one hundred and forty entries. Each entry is a city, and beneath each city, in careful handwriting, is a short list of restaurants, museums, streets, and — occasionally — small notations like “eat here on our anniversary” or “wear the green dress.”
The book was, apparently, kept by Ilana from the mid-1990s onward. It was her project. She had collected, over the course of approximately twenty-five years, recommendations from friends, from magazines, from the small guidebooks she had bought during their few short vacations together.
The book had been intended, according to Salvatore, as a plan for their retirement.
He had, when Ilana died, kept the book on the shelf beside his bed.
He had, in the spring of 2024, taken it down.
He had, in his kitchen, one Tuesday afternoon, opened it, chosen a city, and begun to write.
The reviews
I want to be clear about the nature of Salvatore’s reviews, because it is the nature of the reviews that has, in Delfina’s later thinking, mattered most.
Salvatore’s reviews are not, in the way one might expect, elaborate fantasies. They are not, in their tone, aspirational. They are not, in their content, the kind of writing a person produces when they are pretending to have gone somewhere.
They are, according to Delfina and to me, the kind of writing a person produces when they have — for many years, and in careful detail — imagined going somewhere. The reviews contain small telling details. A specific salt shaker. A particular wallpaper pattern. The name of a waiter who, in one review, has a small tattoo on his wrist. The reviews are populated by small quiet observations that could only be made by someone who had spent a long time thinking about what it would be like to be there.
Salvatore had, apparently, been thinking about these places for decades.
He had, in the reviews, put down what he had been thinking about.
The followers
Salvatore has, at the time of this writing, forty-seven followers on Yelp.
Delfina has looked at all of them.
They are, as far as she can tell, real people. Most are people who have, at some point, been to one of the restaurants Salvatore has reviewed, and who — after reading his review — have followed him. Many of them, based on their own profiles, are also people who write reviews of restaurants they have been to. Salvatore, apparently, has become — among a very small subset of people who read Yelp reviews carefully — someone whose reviews are worth reading.
One of his followers, a woman in Portland, has left comments on eleven of Salvatore’s reviews. The comments are, Delfina has told me, “increasingly personal.” She has, in the most recent comments, asked Salvatore whether he has any recommendations for a trip she is planning to Naples.
Salvatore, according to Delfina, has not responded.
Delfina has told me she asked him why.
He said: “I have not been to Naples.”
She said: “Neither have they.”
He said: “But I do not want to lie to them.”
She said: “Papi. You have been lying to them for two years.”
He said: “Not directly.”
He said: “I have been describing places I have imagined. I have not, in the direct sense, said I have been there. I have written descriptions. Anyone can write a description.”
She said: “You have posted them on a review site.”
He said: “That is true.”
He said: “I have not thought about this for a while.”
He said: “I will think about it.”
What Delfina has decided
Delfina has, in the six weeks since the discovery, decided several things.
She has decided that she is not going to tell her grandfather to stop.
She has decided that she is not going to report the reviews to Yelp.
She has decided that she is not going to tell her mother — Salvatore’s daughter — about any of this, at least for now, because she is not sure what her mother would do with the information, and she is fairly sure that whatever her mother would do, it would end the reviews.
She has decided that she wants the reviews to continue.
She has decided that she does not know, precisely, why.
She has told me, in our final conversation, that she has considered several theories. She has told me the theory she keeps coming back to is that her grandfather — a man who spent his working life fixing broken refrigerators, who married a woman who wanted to see the world, who did not, in the end, see it with her — is, in the reviews, doing the thing his wife wanted him to do. He is going to the places she wrote down in the small blue book. He is going in the only way he still can.
She has told me: “He is fifty-two years late. But he is finally on the trip.”
She has told me that when she thinks about it that way, she cannot bring herself to interfere.
She has told me that Yelp, in the meantime, does not appear to have noticed.
She has told me that she will, when the time comes, do what she needs to do.
She has told me that the time has not, so far, come.
The trip she is making
Delfina, at the time of this writing, is preparing for her trip to San Sebastián.
She has, at her grandfather’s request, agreed to take his notebook with her. She is going to take photos of the restaurants he has written about. She is going to bring them back to him. She is going to sit with him in his kitchen, in the fall, and show him the photos, and let him tell her what he was imagining and how close it was.
She has told me she is going to eat, at the small Basque restaurant he described, the txipirones en su tinta.
She has told me she is going to try to notice, as she eats it, exactly what her grandfather would have noticed.
She has told me she does not think she will succeed.
She has told me she is going to try anyway.
What this is
I have, in the weeks since I first heard this story, thought a great deal about the difference between having been somewhere and having imagined it carefully. In the strict factual sense, they are very different things. In the sense that matters, most of the time, in day-to-day life, they are also different things. But there are, I have come to believe, certain kinds of imagination that are so careful, so patient, and so specifically loving that they begin, in some small way, to close the gap.
Salvatore has spent seventeen years thinking about places he did not go with the woman he loved. He has spent two years writing about them. He has, in his descriptions of the light coming through a specific window, in the observation of a specific dog under a specific table, in the imagined conversation with a specific baker about butter — he has, in some way I do not entirely have language for, been there. (For a related earlier piece on the small quiet acts people undertake in the absence of the person they miss, see the Wattalife story about the 67-year-old man who began dressing as his own 1987 self after his wife’s death.)
I do not know whether what Salvatore is doing is honest. I am not sure it matters. I think that within the small technical ethics of Yelp reviews, it is probably not, strictly speaking, okay. I think that within the larger ethics of what a person does with the imagination they still have after the person they loved is gone, it is one of the more beautiful things I have encountered in this year of writing.
Salvatore has, according to Delfina, been working on a new review this week.
The review is for a small trattoria in a specific street in Bologna.
Delfina has not, at his request, read it yet.
She will, she has told me, read it when he is ready.
—
Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, since reporting this story, opened a small notebook of her own and begun to make a list. She has not, so far, decided what the list is for. She has decided only that it belongs, for now, to her.