Bad gastro review: not a case for the personality rights police
The Berlin Regional Court ruled that a reasonable user would recognize a purely subjective expression of opinion in the online star rating for a restaurant.
Did it taste good? Restaurateurs have to live with reviews, a court has ruled.
(Image: Aleksandra Suzi/Shutterstock.com)
Arguing about taste is not always successful, even in court. The owner of a Berlin restaurant has now had to find this out. The restaurateur wanted to take action against a bad review on an online platform. Among other things, a guest had written that the food was "not mine at all" and that the "salt-to-pepper ratio" was not right at all. The enraged guest wanted to force the portal, on which this assessment by a third party appeared together with a few points in the form of stars, to delete this perceived disgrace in court.
The Berlin II Regional Court rejected the restaurant operator's application in a ruling on August 7 and refused to issue the requested temporary injunction (case reference: 27 O 262/25 eV). According to a report in the Neue Juristische Wochenschrift (NJW), the court assumed that the negative review did not significantly violate the restaurant operator's right of personality. The judges said that rating restaurants online is now an "everyday phenomenon" and that most "reviews" of this kind are based on personal taste.
According to the NJW, the court emphasized that a star rating on the internet is more of a subjective opinion and not a verifiable statement of fact. The saying "There's no accounting for taste" therefore applies here. Reasonable users would know that such a rating merely reflects a personal opinion and does not mean that the food was objectively bad.
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Notification procedure under the DSA not followed
The judges did not even feel that they had jurisdiction over this case. The restaurateur had stated the amount in dispute as 5,000 euros. The regional court considered this sum to be incomprehensible. In its opinion, concrete economic disadvantages must be proven in such cases, which was obviously not possible here. In the case of a lower amount in dispute, the district court had jurisdiction, so that the application was not justified for this reason either.
The competent chamber also criticized the fact that the applicant had not followed the correct procedures. According to the decision, in order to obtain a deletion, she should have used the platform's official notification procedure, which is required under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA). The reference to the procedure in the legal notice or in a three-point menu in the immediate vicinity of the review satisfied the requirements for user-friendliness and accessibility under the Platform Act. However, the restaurant manager had only sent a simple, informal message. As long as the platform has not received the complaint via the official channels and thus gained knowledge of it, it cannot be held liable according to the court.
(vbr)
