How we score restaurants

People who have eaten there — or asked the kitchen directly — answer the same short questions about what the restaurant cooks with, and those answers turn into a 0–100 score. Chains with 20 or more locations are rated as one: a review of any location counts toward the whole chain, so a national brand builds a real score fast. A smaller restaurant that happens to share a name with another is scored on its own. Each person gets one review per restaurant or chain — reviewing again updates it rather than adding a second vote.

Every rating answers up to four questions — how much of the menu uses seed oils, artificial additives, plastic contact, and premade food. “None” is a perfect answer, “Some” is halfway, “All” is the worst; for seed oils, a kitchen that swaps to better oils on request earns a bump. Each category gets its own 0–100 score, and the overall score blends them by how much they matter:

What the kitchen actually fries and cooks in. The dominant category — it moves the overall score six times as much as plastics.

Dyes, preservatives, and synthetic flavorings in the food itself.

Food prepped, stored, or served in plastic. A tie-breaker, not a driver.

Does the food arrive premade and reheated, or is it made fresh in-house? Also a tie-breaker.

Every answer also carries how the reviewer knows it, and better evidence literally weighs more in the math. A category’s score is the confidence-weighted average of all its answers, rescaled to 0–100 — so one public statement from the restaurant counts as much as four hunches:

A gut feel from eating there. Counts, but only a quarter as much as proof.

The reviewer watched the kitchen work or read it off a label.

A cook or server answered the question directly.

The restaurant answered in writing.

The restaurant says it publicly — menu, website, or press. Full weight.

Moderated before it counts

Ratings are AI-moderated before they touch a score: only approved reviews are counted, so spam, brigading, and off-topic reviews never move a restaurant’s number. Reviewers can skip any question they are not sure about — a skipped question simply does not count, in either direction.

Unrated categories count as zero here

A category nobody has answered yet has no score of its own. This website has no standards of yours to go on, so it shows the number the app shows someone who has picked every food standard: all four categories count toward the overall score and an unanswered one counts as zero — a restaurant rated only on plastics is not “great overall”, it is unproven everywhere else. A restaurant with no approved ratings at all shows as Unrated: gray, not a verdict. We never fill gaps with guesses.

Personalized to you

In the app, the food standards you pick for groceries also personalize the map: artificial ingredients maps to additives, ultra-processed to premade food, seed oils to seed oils, and risky packaging to plastic contact. Every restaurant score is re-weighted to just the categories you care about, and one you care about that the restaurant has no ratings for counts as a zero for you — “unproven on the thing I care about” should drag your personal score down, not be silently ignored. Sugar, carbs and gluten have no restaurant category, so they change nothing here. With no standards picked (or none that apply to restaurants), the app blends the rated categories only, which can read higher than the number on this website.

Restaurant scores band exactly like product scores, plus the gray Unrated state for places without approved ratings yet:

Poor

0–40

Okay

41–69

Clean

70–100