Why chief of restaurant review site OpenRice has a lot on his plate
Alfred Tsoi is taking the wildly successful restaurant review website beyond its local origins and into new markets across Asia
Walk into any restaurant in Hong Kong and you're likely to spot someone snapping pictures of food with their smartphone.
Some of them may just share their pictures with friends on Facebook, but others will upload the shots, complete with comments, on OpenRice, the online restaurant guide that now covers 41,486 places to eat in Hong Kong and which gets 92.8 million page views a month - the equivalent of every Hongkonger taking nearly 14 looks.
"OpenRice must have something to do with the whole photo-taking trend," jokes Alfred Tsoi Po-tak, who took charge of the site at the end of last year.
But Tsoi, 59, can't just sit back and watch the comments roll in; there's no shortage of work to be done on the site, he says.
Unlike some websites, OpenRice is not open for anyone to add comments directly. Instead, its 618,863 food reviews have all been given the once over by the site's editors.
"When someone says a dish is salty, it's purely personal taste," Tsoi says. "But when he says there's a cockroach in there, it's something different. Such accusations can be very damaging if presented without proof."