Two people can eat at the same restaurant in the same week and describe entirely different places. The variation is real, and most of it comes from how restaurants actually operate rather than from differing taste.
A restaurant is not the same on every shift
The kitchen on a Tuesday is often a different set of people from the kitchen on a Saturday, with different levels of experience on each station.
Dishes cooked on the grill and dishes cooked on the sauté station may be consistently good and consistently uneven within the same meal, depending on who is standing there.
A reviewer ordering across those stations gets a mixed impression; one ordering within a single station gets a clear but partial one.
Volume changes the output
A kitchen running at capacity holds more components ready, plates faster and has less time for the small corrections that happen when things are calm.
A quiet service allows more care but also means items have been held longer or cooked to order from a colder start.
Neither condition is the restaurant's real state, and a meal eaten in one tells you relatively little about the other.
Where you sit shapes the meal
Service quality varies by section, since each server covers a defined group of tables and their competence and workload differ.
Noise, temperature, lighting and proximity to a door or a kitchen pass all influence how a meal is experienced independently of the food.
These factors are rarely mentioned in reviews because they are hard to attribute, but they account for a great deal of the disagreement.
Reviewers arrive with different reference points
A dish is judged against whatever the diner has eaten before, so familiarity with a cuisine changes what counts as authentic, generous or expensive.
Expectation set by price, decor and reputation also shifts judgement, since the same plate reads differently depending on what it cost.
Professional critics address this by visiting several times, anonymously, and ordering broadly, which is precisely what a single online review cannot do.
Timing within a restaurant's life matters
Menus change, chefs leave, owners cut costs and suppliers switch, and a review captures the restaurant only as it was on that date.
Reviews accumulate on a page without expiring, so a reader sees years of different restaurants presented as one.
Reading the most recent entries and ignoring the average is therefore a better use of a review page than any attempt to weigh the opinions against each other.