Every score here is a position, not a grade: where a place sits against everywhere we track. That is what makes two listings comparable, and it is what lets a badge mean something specific instead of something nice.
The bar. At 60 a place is better regarded than six in ten of everywhere we track — so that is where a rank, a badge and a number switch on. Below it we publish the facts and skip the grade.
The Score, then the Regulars, then Hype, then the share who’d go back. Same order on every page, every card, every email — so nothing can be reordered into looking better than it is.
The headline number: Local favorite 60+ · Top 25% at 78 · Top 10% at 90.
Computed from people who actually ate there. Nobody hand-picks this number.
Everything the internet already says, as one number on our scale.
One question, open to all members. Not a rating — a recommendation.
The badges: Local favorite 60+ · Top 25% · 78+ · Top 10% · 90+ · 💎 Underrated
A 0–100 position. It is ours when we have been ourselves, the regulars’ once enough of them have filed, and otherwise the Hype Number the place already carries. It renders lavender at 60, chartreuse at 78 and pink at 90, the same way on every surface of this site. What feeds it: the food, the consistency, the service, and what it all cost. What does not feed it: advertising spend, whether the owner emailed us, or how nice the tote bag was.
Computed from verified locals who answered ten short questions about a meal they actually ate. It is always shown in lavender, never colour-coded by badge, because it answers a different question than ours. No single person sets it, and it does not appear at all until a place has 3 published takes — below that the page says Not ranked yet and means it. Regulars never see our number before they answer. How the Regulars work →
The public star rating from the big platforms, converted onto our 0–100 scale so it can sit beside a rank and be read the same way. Always pink. It measures what the internet believes, which is a genuinely useful thing to know and a different thing from whether the food is good. It never feeds the Score or the regulars’ number — it is there so you can see both at once.
Not a star rating. One question put to every member: would you go back? The number is the percentage who said yes, always fourth. One vote per member per place, votes are visible only after you cast yours, and it never feeds the Score. It is the room’s gut check sitting next to ours.
And that is the whole list. There is no badge for the bottom of the scale, because we do not publish one. A place under 60 gets a full listing — address, hours, cuisine, photos, what regulars said — and no number, no badge, no adjective. We are here to point you at the good ones, not to grade everybody.
Five stars is a short ruler.
The Hype Number takes that same praise and lays it out on a scale with room in it, so the difference between good and great is visible again.
A rating with barely any evidence behind it does not get treated like one with thousands. Confidence has to be earned before it counts for anything — which is also what protects a brand-new place from a couple of quiet nights.
Ratings run hot in some categories and cool in others. A place is measured against the ones it actually competes with, so a great pizzeria is not penalised for keeping good company.
The exact weighting stays private. Hype is built from third-party ratings, and a public formula is an instruction manual for inflating one. The Score and the regulars’ number are fully explained on this page — those are ours, and nobody can farm them.
A listing that hasn’t cleared the bar shows the useful stuff — where it is, when it’s open, what it serves, photos, and whatever the regulars have added — and the words Not ranked yet. No placeholder score, no “3.5 by default,” no average of its neighbours, and nothing that reads as a grade. Under 25 public ratings we don’t even place a Hype Number: too thin to be fair either way.
We book under a name nobody there knows, sit where we’re put, wait like everyone else, and pay the full check. No comped meals, no press dinners, no heads-up call, no chef’s table. If a kitchen recognises us mid-meal, the visit is thrown out and we go back another day.
Every ranked place goes back into the rotation on a fixed schedule — the same schedule for the ones we loved and the ones paying us for a banner. Chefs change, kitchens find their feet, standards move. A score is a snapshot with a date on it, and the date is printed.
Facts go stale — hours change, chefs move, a place renovates. If something on a listing is wrong, or you think we caught a place on a genuinely unusual night, say so and we’ll go back. One fresh anonymous visit, by someone who hasn’t read the first write-up.
Scores can't be bought. Only earned.
Who the regulars are, what gets a take pulled, and what it costs to be seen here.
Something here look wrong? Tell us — we publish corrections with the same enthusiasm we publish everything else.