The rules, in the open.
This is the document the whole site rests on. It says what a take has to be, what gets one taken down, and what will never get one taken down no matter who asks or what they offer.
What makes a good take
A good take is one a stranger can act on. It does not have to be long or balanced. It has to be true and it has to be specific.
Write up the meal you ate. Not what your brother-in-law told you, not a photo you scrolled past, not the place’s reputation. If you did not sit down or open the bag yourself, you don’t have a take yet.
Name the dish. Name the hour. Say what the wait actually was, what the bill actually came to, what the person behind the counter actually said. “Great place” helps nobody. “The crust has a real char, and they’ll split a pie half-and-half without sighing at you” helps everybody. Detail is what separates a take from a mood.
A rough month is enough. Kitchens change hands, chefs leave, a quiet stretch ends. Dating your visit is fair to the restaurant and it is what makes your take still readable two years from now.
“Every clam came out open” is a fact. “I would move in if they let me” is a feeling. Both belong in a take. Do not dress the second one up as the first.
One location, one meal, one take. Been three times? Say so, and write up the pattern — that is more useful than any single night, and the regulars’ score weighs it that way.
What is not allowed
These are the things that get a take removed. The list is short on purpose. Everything not on it stays up.
- A meal you did not eat. Fabricated visits, invented details, a take on a restaurant you have never been inside.
- A place you own or compete with. You may not write up a business you own, work for, are related to the owner of, or run a rival to. That includes takes written on someone else’s behalf, and takes traded for a free meal in either direction.
- Personal information about staff. No last names, phone numbers, home addresses, social profiles, immigration status, or medical details. Describe the role and the behaviour, never the person’s private life.
- Threats and slurs. No violence, no attacks on race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, or disability, no sustained campaign against one employee who cannot answer back.
- Blaming the kitchen for a delivery app. An order that sat in a car for fifty minutes is a story about the app. Aim it at the party that dropped it.
- Spam and promotion. Link dumps, marketing copy, the same paragraph pasted across five restaurants, or anything whose real job is advertising something else.
- Off-topic content. Political speeches, feuds with other members, and anything unrelated to eating at the restaurant.
- Impersonation and sockpuppets. One account per person, under a display name you actually use. No second accounts built to pile on a single kitchen.
How reporting works
Including an owner reporting a take about their own restaurant. There is no charge, no priority queue, and nothing to buy your way into. A report is a request for a human to look, not a mark against the writer.
- Factually false or fabricated
- Harassment or personal attack
- Spam or promotional
- Reveals private information
- Competitor or conflict of interest
- Something else
Not a scoring model, and not an automatic removal once complaints cross a threshold. If volume decided outcomes, the loudest party would always win. So we read the take itself, the account’s history, the pattern around it, and whatever evidence came with the report.
The take stays, the take comes down, or we ask the author to fix one specific part that breaks a rule. Repeat offenders lose their account. Reporting a take because you disagree with it is not itself a violation — doing it in volume is a reliable way to get your future reports deprioritised.
How restaurant replies work
Claim your restaurant and you can answer anything on your page, in public, underneath it, in your own words. No time limit, no moderation queue for a reasonable reply, no charge. It is free, it is permanent, and it is the single most useful thing an owner can do here.
A restaurant reply may not publish a customer’s personal information, threaten them, or work as harassment. “Our records show no reservation under that name” is a fair correction. Anything that reads as a warning to the customer is not, and it comes down.
The replies that land are short and unglamorous: thank the person, say what changed, invite them back. Arguing line by line with a stranger almost never reads the way it feels while you are typing it.
The removal standard
We remove takes that break the rules on this page. We do not remove one because somebody would rather it wasn’t there. No amount of money changes that.
Not advertising spend. Not a sponsorship. Not a partnership. There is no internal process for paid removal here, because we never built the product. If anyone ever tells you otherwise, they are wrong, and we would like to hear about it on the contact page.
The flip side is just as flat: rule-breaking takes come down for free, for everyone, whether or not the restaurant has ever given us a dollar. A claimed listing and an unclaimed one get the same reading.
You can edit a take — worth doing when a restaurant fixes something — and the edit is marked. You can delete your own at any time. What you cannot do is delete someone else’s, and we do not accept deletion requests routed through a third party claiming to speak for the author.
Takes on Sour Grapes are the statements of the regulars who wrote them. We host them; publishing one is not us asserting it is correct. If you run a restaurant and believe something in a take is factually false — not unflattering, false — write to us with the restaurant, the page URL, the exact claim, and anything that shows it: reservation records, receipts, timestamps. “This never happened” alone is not something we can act on. With specifics, we investigate properly and tell you what we found, whichever way it lands.
First time is usually a removal and a note. Deliberate fabrication, an undisclosed conflict of interest, or harassment can end an account on the spot. Trying to buy or sell a take — in either direction — ends it permanently.
Rules read. Know somewhere good?
Ten questions about a meal you actually ate. Your name goes on it, and so does ours.
These rules change as people find new ways to game the system. Material changes get posted here; the rest of the legal frame lives in the terms and the privacy policy.