We’ve come up with a fun and simple way to rate all the restaurants we visit.

Here’s how it works:

Our Categories:

1. Food (🍽️ 40%)
This is the heart of every dining experience, so it carries the most weight. If the food blows us away, this category will make up almost half of the overall score.

2. Service (💁‍♀️ 17%)

3. Ambiance (🌿 17%)

4. Value for Money (💸 17%)

5. Location (📍9%)
Location plays a smaller role in our review system, carrying the least weight. Especially in the US, where getting to most restaurants involves hopping in a car, the specific location doesn’t matter as much as the experience once you’re there.

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The Star Rating System:

We use a 0 to 5 star scale for each category. To determine the final rating, we take the score for each category, multiply it by its weight, and then sum them all together. Here’s the formula:

Overall Rating = (Food * 0.4) + (Service * 0.17) + (Ambiance * 0.17) + (Value * 0.17) + (Location * 0.09)

The final score is rounded to the nearest half or whole star. For example, if a restaurant’s overall score is 3.8, we’d round it to 4 stars.

Example:

Here’s how it might look in action. If we visited a place and gave the following ratings:

• Food: 4 stars
• Service: 3 stars
• Ambiance: 4 stars
• Value for Money: 3.5 stars
• Location: 4.5 stars

The weighted score would be calculated like this:

(4 * 0.4) + (3 * 0.17) + (4 * 0.117) + (3.5 * 0.17) + (4.5 * 0.09) = 3.79

Rounded to the nearest half-star, the restaurant would receive an overall rating of 4 stars.