Understanding the mechanisms underlying consumers’ evaluation behavior is a critical task for practitioners to gain benefits from online customer reviews. Our study aims to investigate the influence of regional economic status on consumers’ online rating behavior in the Chinese catering sector. Using online review data collected from Dianping, we conduct multiple regressions to test our hypotheses. The key findings of our study are as follows. First, consumers from cities with a higher economic status tend to write online restaurant reviews with lower ratings. Second, consumers’ economic status has a weaker negative effect on their ratings when restaurants are more popular. Third, the negative effect of consumers’ economic status on their ratings is stronger for consumers with richer online review experience, but weaker for consumers with richer travel experience. Our findings provide helpful insights to researchers as well as practitioners