Happy Holidays Only to the Woman Singing Yelp Reviews on TikTok

Yelp can either be an incredibly useful website if you’re looking for somewhere to eat, or a hellhole of petty grievances. There is no in between. You get open hours and whether or not a spot is BYOB, or you get some dude scream-typing about how he watched Hell’s Kitchen once and this risotto was not exactly the consistency he saw on TV and HE WOULD GIVE ZERO STARS IF HE COULD. So singer and comedian Grace Hayes decided to immortalize outlandish Yelp reviews... in song.

Hayes has a series of videos, each dedicated to reviews of different fast food chains. In one, a Taco Bell customer’s quesadilla was “severely lacking in sour cream,” or as another put it, “quesadilla blasphemy.” In her video about McDonald’s, she soothingly croons about Sprite that tastes like gas. And apparently someone described Arby’s as a “mess of meats and curdled cheese.” Hayes string these complaints together into beautiful piano pieces. Sara Bareilles could never!

Hayes tells Eater that she writes jingles for birthdays, YouTube videos, and voicemails, so she’s “always looking for new things to write about to keep me on my toes.” She got the idea when she noticed almost all reviews for fast food restaurants on Yelp were one-star. She screenshotted the angriest reviews, and searched for lines that spoke to her. “For example, while reading Taco Bell reviews I saw ‘I came for an empanada, but all I got was an argument,’ and knew I had to include that!” she said.

Her work is an extremely pleasant way to absorb the reality that somebody had a fried fly in their fries, and that another person thought their Arby’s meat looked green. Let’s all pivot to more sung reviews in 2020. I want to hear an opera about Hudson Yards.