«All verified»: what it means, and what it doesn’t

Next to every restaurant’s reviews on this site it says «all verified». It is a phrase you read everywhere and that almost never means anything. Here it means something precise, and it is worth saying what — not least because the same rule that makes it true is the one that leaves us with fewer reviews than anybody else.

The rule, in one line

You review a meal you ate, not a restaurant.

Writing one needs four things together: a booking made here, linked to your account, in the past, and not cancelled. One per visit: if you go back, you can write another.

It is not a filter against unhappy guests. It is the only way we know to answer the question underneath every review on the internet — *was this person actually there?* — without asking anyone and without having to take their word for it.

What it makes impossible

• The restaurant writing its own reviews: it would have to book here and turn up, once per review.
• Trashing a competitor: same thing, with dinner paid for.
• Twenty reviews bought in bulk: twenty bookings, twenty evenings, twenty tables actually taken.

None of these becomes impossible *by magic*: it becomes exactly as expensive as dinner, which is the point.

What it does NOT mean

Here comes the part a listings site usually leaves out.

• It does not mean the judgement is right. Someone who ate there may have had a bad evening, or expected something else. Verified means *it happened*, not *they are right*.
• It does not mean there are many. A place with few reviews here is not a place with bad reviews: it is a place that only recently started taking bookings through this site. That is why, where there are none, we do not draw five empty stars: we write that nobody has written yet.
• It does not mean they are all of them. Someone who ate there after booking by phone cannot review here. Their impressions exist all the same; they are simply not ours to publish.

What we do, and what we do not

We do not edit the text of reviews. We do not reorder them in favour of whoever pays — and there is nothing to pay. We do not sell the removal of a bad review: that service does not exist, and if it ever did, this sentence would be the first thing that had to change.

The restaurant may reply publicly, and the reply appears under the review. Whoever wrote one can withdraw it whenever they like. And if a review breaks the rules — insults, other people’s data, advertising — we remove it and tell the person who wrote it, with the reason next to it: a review that vanishes in silence looks like the restaurant made it vanish.

The name

Of whoever writes, only the first name shows, never the surname. First name and surname next to a place and a date are an identifiable person, and the reader does not need them to decide whether to trust the review. Anyone who prefers leaves the signature empty, and it appears as «a guest».

The rules are written out in the terms of use, and what becomes public is in how we handle your data.