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There are tons of restaurants that look good online.

But a restaurant is more than a star rating. What do people actually order? Which dishes are worth coming back for? Is a place consistently good, or did one thing just happen to go viral?

True Dish is built to give you a better sense of a restaurant before you go.

Community reviews show what different people thought of their experience, while dish ratings help surface the food people are actually excited about and would order again. You can see what regular diners think, discover places you might not have found otherwise, and get a clearer picture of what a restaurant does well and where it might fall short.

The goal isn’t to tell you where to eat. It’s to give you enough real experiences, opinions, and dish-level feedback to find places that sound right for you.

A restaurant on True Dish can have two scores, and we intentionally keep them separate.

The True Dish Score comes from our own review. We visit the restaurant, pay for our meal, and rate the food, value, service, and atmosphere based on that experience.

We only review what we actually ordered, and every review is dated. Restaurants change. Menus change. Staff changes. A review from three years ago isn’t going to hold the same weight as it would now.

The Community Score comes from everyone else on True Dish.

Each member can leave one review per restaurant. They can update that review if their opinion changes, but they can’t stack multiple reviews to push a restaurant’s score up or down.

We never combine the True Dish Score with the Community Score.

One True Dish visit and hundreds of community reviews represent two very different things. Averaging them together would create a number that doesn’t mean much.

And realistically, most restaurants will never receive an official True Dish review. Kansas City has a lot of places to eat, and there are only so many meals we can get through.

A restaurant with three perfect reviews has a 5.0 average.

A restaurant with 400 reviews averaging 4.6 has a 4.6 average.

But those numbers don’t have the same amount of evidence behind them.

That’s why True Dish shows a restaurant’s real average rating while using an adjusted rating when restaurants are ranked or sorted.

The adjusted rating starts closer to the average restaurant on True Dish. As more people review a restaurant, that adjustment matters less and the restaurant’s own rating matters more.

A couple of reviews barely move the needle.

A couple hundred reviews move it almost entirely.

That means a restaurant with three 5-star reviews can still proudly display its 5.0, while a restaurant that has maintained a 4.6 across hundreds of reviews may appear higher in ranked lists.

It protects restaurants in the other direction, too. One unusually bad review shouldn’t destroy an otherwise strong restaurant’s reputation.

For the curious: our site average carries roughly the same weight as 8 reviews. Once a restaurant has more reviews than that, its own community rating begins carrying most of the weight.

What about percentages?

Questions like Would you return? and Was it worth the price? are calculated separately from star ratings.

But percentages have the same small-sample problem.

Five people saying they’d return gives a restaurant 100%—but that’s very different from 94 out of 100 people saying the same thing.

So percentages don’t appear until at least 5 people have answered the question.

And when restaurants are sorted using those percentages, we adjust for the number of responses so that a perfect score from five people doesn’t automatically outrank an excellent score backed by hundreds.

Trending

Trending shows restaurants getting more attention than usual right now.

Instead of simply rewarding the restaurants that are always busy, we compare each restaurant with its own normal activity.

That means a huge restaurant having an ordinary week won’t necessarily trend, while a smaller restaurant suddenly getting a lot of attention might.

Trending activity can include:

• Reviews
• Saves
• Restaurant page views
• Helpful votes

Only activity from signed-in members counts, and each person can contribute once per day toward a restaurant’s trending activity.

At least 3 different people need to interact with a restaurant before it can appear.

Trending updates daily and looks primarily at activity from the last 7 days, so restaurants naturally fall off once the extra attention dies down.

Hidden Gems

Hidden Gems are restaurants people seem to genuinely love, but that haven’t gotten a huge amount of attention yet.

To qualify, a restaurant needs at least 8* community reviews and an adjusted rating of 4.2 or higher.

It also needs to still be relatively undiscovered. A restaurant with hundreds of reviews isn’t exactly hidden anymore.

The goal is to surface great places before everybody else finds them.

*Note: The threshold of 8 is subject to change, as the site grows.

Community Favorites

Community Favorites are the restaurants diners most consistently say they’d happily visit again.

To qualify, a restaurant needs at least 5 community reviews and an overall rating of 4.0 or higher.

From there, we look at how strongly the community says yes, I’d come back while accounting for how many people have actually answered.

• No paid placement. Restaurants can’t pay for a better position in search results, a badge, or a higher rating.
• No sponsored reviews disguised as regular reviews. We pay for our own meals. If that ever isn’t the case, we’ll clearly disclose it.
• No mixing our opinion with yours. The True Dish Score and Community Score stay separate.
• No imported ratings. Restaurant information may come from outside data sources, including Foursquare’s places data, but the ratings, votes, and reviews you see on True Dish were created on True Dish.
• No deleting criticism just because someone doesn’t like it. A restaurant asking us to remove a negative review isn’t, by itself, a reason for us to remove it.

Honest criticism is welcome. Abuse isn’t.

We may remove reviews that contain spam, harassment, abusive content, fraudulent activity, or content that isn’t actually about the restaurant or dining experience.

We won’t remove a review simply because another person or the restaurant disagrees with it.

Every review can be reported directly from the review page, and reports are reviewed by a real person.

If a member deletes their True Dish account, their existing reviews remain on the site under Former member.

Removing every review when an account disappears could significantly change restaurant ratings and erase useful contributions other diners relied on.

Email us at truedish@truedishreviews.com.

True Dish covers Kansas City for now.

There are already more than enough restaurants here to keep us busy.

We’d rather build something genuinely useful for one city before trying to cover everywhere.