A restaurant site can start in one of two ways. Either you wait for restaurateurs to sign up — and start from nothing, growing one place at a time — or you start from what is already public. This site did the second.
The sources
Open mapping data and company registers: two lists that exist for other reasons and that, put together, say where the restaurants are. From there come the name, the address, the coordinates, sometimes the phone number and the kind of cooking.
The upside is obvious: you can look for a place in your town even if that place has never heard of Bitebooker.
The flaw, which is the same thing
No automatic source declares a closure in time. Company registers cover companies, not sole traders, and a closure is recorded months later anyway; mapping data updates when somebody walks past and notices.
So the first to know a restaurant has closed is whoever turns up for dinner and finds the shutters down. There is no technical way around that.
What follows, for us
If the only reliable source is the person walking past, then reporting has to be the easiest thing on the site. Which is why, at the bottom of every listing:
- no account, no email to confirm, no captcha;
- the reason is picked from a list and the note is optional — asking people to write a justification for a closed restaurant means getting fewer reports;
- when enough people report the same thing, the listing comes down immediately, without waiting for someone to empty a queue.
A listing goes back up in one click. A wasted evening doesn’t.
And for you
If you find a mistake, saying so takes seconds and asks nothing in return. If the place is yours, the same link applies — and it’s also where you start to correct it rather than remove it.
This site does one thing: find a table and book it.