How Tastbudz works

Only an account with a verified email address can rate a dish or post anything else. Signing in with Google or Apple counts as verified.

One account can post up to 60 ratings at once, and after that 60 more an hour. Tastbudz staff are exempt.

Each person has one current rating per dish. Rating it again the same day changes that rating. Rating it again on a later visit makes the new rating the one that counts, and the earlier one is kept, with its date, rather than overwritten.

Anyone with a verified account can report a rating, and we review reports within 24 hours. See Support for how.

Our lists of top-rated dishes, on a restaurant's page and across Tastbudz, weigh a dish's average by how many people rated it. With only a rating or two, its score is pulled toward the average of every dish on Tastbudz, so a single five-star rating does not put a dish above one that fifty people rated 4.8. A restaurant's menu, which opens sorted by rating, and search results you sort by rating are in order of each dish's plain average instead.

A dish's score appears in link previews, and in what we tell search engines, only once at least 3 people have rated it.

The few dishes a restaurant page leads with are ones diners rated well, ones a published list names, ones the restaurant's own menu marks (as popular, a signature or new, say), or ones named for the restaurant, and each says which. We call them “What to order” only when enough rest on diners, published lists or the menu's own recommendations, never on “new” alone.

Nobody can pay to rank higher, to be among those dishes, or to have a rating removed.

“Claimed” means someone showed us they control one of the restaurant's own channels (an email address at its website's domain, the domain itself, its business documents, or a phone call with us) and now helps keep its listing up to date. Every change they make is recorded and can be undone.

The restaurant's own people cannot rate its dishes or vote on its ratings. They can answer a rating with a public reply instead. To report them, use the Report link beside “Claimed”.

Most dishes have no photo yet, so they show an illustration instead. The illustrations were drawn by an AI image model, not photographed. Where a picture has room for it, an illustration says “Illustration” on it; on the website, a smaller one says so when you point at it.

In a dish's photo gallery, each photo says whether it came with a diner's rating, was added by a member, or was copied from another location of the same chain.

Most of each menu is read by software from the restaurant's website and menu pages, and from the ordering services it uses. Members add dishes and fix mistakes, and a restaurant's own people can update its menu. Nobody checks each menu with the restaurant, so one can be out of date.

Allergens shown for a dish come from the menu's own words, are worked out from the ingredients it names, or were added by a person here, and the dish page says which. Nobody checks them with the restaurant. Recipes change and kitchens share equipment, so a dish with nothing listed can still contain allergens. If you have an allergy, ask the staff before you order.

An order link takes you to the restaurant's own ordering page, or its page on the delivery service it uses. We add no tracking or affiliate code of our own and are not paid when you order. We count how often each restaurant's link is followed, and when you are signed in we also note that you followed it, so we learn which links people use.

No AI writes what you read here. Dish names and descriptions come from restaurants' menus, or from members who added or corrected a dish, and our software tidies them by fixed rules (taking a size out of a dish's name, say). Ratings and their notes are diners'. The short reasons beside a dish, such as “Rated 4.6 by 3 diners”, are put together from those, never generated.