Survey Ratings

-- Food
-- Service
-- Ambience

In comparison with other restaurants in the same price-bracket, performance in the survey is ...

-- Exceptional
-- Very good
-- Good
-- Average
-- Poor

Anything else I need to know?

That phrase above in bold is important

Our rating system is unlike those found in other guides and websites (most of which tell you nothing more helpful than that expensive restaurants are, by and large, better than cheap ones).

What we do is to compare each restaurant's performance -- as judged by the average grades awarded by reporters in the survey -- with other restaurants in the same price-bracket.

This approach has the advantage that it helps you find -- whatever your budget for any particular meal -- where you will get the best 'bang for your buck'.

What is the Annual Survey?

We believe in “people power”: our guide is for ordinary diners, by ordinary diners.

Every spring, we invite everyone who’s registered with our site to take part in our survey. We collect tens of thousands of reviews from 1,000s of ‘ordinary’ restaurant-goers, who tell us about their favourite and least-favourite experiences of the previous 12 months.

We analyse each restaurant’s reviews – sometimes, for more popular places, several hundred of them  – to see how their average ratings for food service and ambience compare with other establishments charging similar prices.

We then extract snippets from the commentary ‘reporters’ have given to explain and illustrate the ratings we’ve awarded on the basis of those average ratings.

Even if we’ve been to the restaurant concerned (which, in London, we usually have), we don't seek to superimpose our own views at all. We just do our best to explain the ratings which our analysis of the survey suggests are appropriate.

Would you like to become a restaurant critic too? Just register with us now (it only takes a minute).

Prices

The price shown for each restaurant is the cost for one (1) person of an average three-course dinner with half a bottle of house wine and coffee, any cover charge, service and VAT. Lunch is often cheaper. With BYO restaurants, we have assumed that two people share a £5 bottle of off-licence wine.

Diary

You can use our diary facility to store your views for use when the survey comes round.