Yahoo Sports Rockets fans welcome Ayesha Curry's restaurant to Houston with negative Yelp reviews
Ayesha Curry, the entrepreneurial wife of Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry, is expanding her barbecue restaurant business to Houston, and let’s just say Rockets fans aren’t licking their chops.
The Food Network star and cookbook author partnered with James Beard award-winning chef Michael Mina for a pop-up preview of International Smoke in Houston in late May, when the Warriors were in the midst of their seven-game Western Conference finals victory against the Rockets, and fans of both Texas basketball and BBQ have since inundated the restaurant’s Yelp profile with one-star reviews.
International Smoke’s Houston locale doesn’t open for good until July 5, but Houstonians have already littered its Yelp reviews with Warriors-inspired critiques of snake and cupcake dishes. For example:
It’s unclear what Ayesha Curry — a Californian by way of Canada and North Carolina — expected when she chose to open a barbecue restaurant in Houston, home to Golden State’s most bitter rival and a whole lot of people who don’t want San Franciscans telling them how to smoke their meat, but alas.
On the bright side, the power of Stephen Curry is such that Warriors fans, responding to news of the negative reviews first shared by ClutchPoints.com’s Tomer Azarly, answered with five-star reviews:
The restaurant’s rating settled in at 2 1/2 stars out of five. In an effort to clean up this NBA rivalry’s mess, Yelp vowed “to remove both positive and negative posts that appear to be motivated more by the news coverage itself than the reviewer’s personal consumer experience with the business.”
The San Francisco location of Ayesha Curry’s International Smoke is currently rated 3 1/2 stars.
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Ben Rohrbach is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach
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