The dish, not just the place

You are not choosing a place. You are choosing a meal.

That sounds like the same thing until you have been somewhere excellent and ordered the one dish the kitchen does not care about. A rating out of five is an average across a whole menu, and nobody eats an average.

What a dish page is

A page for one specific thing at one specific place. The lamb at that place on the corner. Not "lamb dishes near you" — that one, at that address, photographed by people who ordered it.

On it: what it actually looks like, what people who ate it thought, and what it costs.

How dishes get rated

When you rate somewhere, you can name what you had. One extra tap, and it builds the page for everybody who comes after you.

That is the whole mechanism. There is no separate review process and nothing for a place to fill in — a dish page exists because somebody ate the dish and said so.

Searching for food rather than for places

Most apps make you pick a cuisine and then work backwards. You know what you want: you want the thing you have been thinking about since eleven o'clock.

Searching for a dish is a more direct question and usually a better one. It also turns up places you would never have filtered into — the best version of a thing near you is frequently somewhere that does not describe itself the way you would have searched.

Ordering off a dish page

The practical use is the last thirty seconds before you order.

You are sitting down, the menu has eleven things on it, and you have no way to tell which one the kitchen actually cares about. Opening the place on your phone and looking at what people photographed answers that faster than asking, and without the awkwardness of asking a waiter which dishes are bad.

It works before you leave the house, too. Deciding between two places is much easier when the question is "which of these two specific plates do I want" rather than "which of these two places has a higher average".

Prices, where people have added them

A dish page shows what people paid, where they said.

That is more useful than a menu, because a menu is a document a place updates when it gets round to it, and because what you want to know is not the price of one thing — it is whether this is a twelve-euro lunch or a twenty-five-euro one. A few dishes with prices on them answers that faster than a PDF.

The awkward truth about menus

Every kitchen has something it is proud of and something it makes because people expect it.

You can usually tell which is which from the photographs, and almost never from the menu. A dish that six people have rated and photographed is a dish somebody is getting right. A dish nobody has ever mentioned, in a place with forty ratings, is telling you something too.

What a place can and cannot do

A place can put its menu up, with prices and sections, and add its own photographs. That is worth having: a full menu is the most useful single thing on a page for somebody deciding where to go.

What it cannot do is write the ratings, choose which dishes get pages, or remove a dish page it would rather did not exist. Those come from people who ate there.

The split is what makes both halves worth reading. The menu tells you what is available; the dish pages tell you what is good.

What else to look at

• Ratings — how the photographs and scores get there
• Lists — keeping the ones you want to go back for
• Order ahead — when you already know what you want
• Food guides — where to eat, written up properly