How Yoomami ranks restaurants
Every restaurant here is ranked on one thing: how much professional critics have written about it. Crowd star-ratings are shown alongside as context, but they never move the ranking. A restaurant with ten thousand five-star user reviews and no critic coverage ranks nowhere.
Restaurants recognised by three or more separate publications are marked Highly recommended. That is the only badge we award, and it is the whole of what we claim.
What counts as a mention
A mention is a restaurant appearing in a professional publication's coverage — a guide entry, a review, a best-of list, or a broadcast segment. Each mention records which publication it came from, what kind of recognition it was, and where we found it. Mentions from the same publication do not stack: ten Eater articles about one restaurant count once.
Publications currently recognised include Michelin Guide, Condé Nast Traveler, Eater, World's 50 Best, La Liste, Gault & Millau, AAA, Forbes Travel Guide, Zagat, Relais & Châteaux, Time Out, The Infatuation, Asia's 50 Best, Condé Nast Traveller India, Times Food Awards, Culinary Culture, Highway On My Plate, Chef's Table, Parts Unknown, No Reservations, Somebody Feed Phil, Ugly Delicious, Stanley Tucci, Salt Fat Acid Heat, Street Food, Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives, Worth It, First We Feast, Man v. Food, Best Thing I Ever Ate, Check, Please!, Kitchen Nightmares, The Food Ranger, Taste the Nation and Thrillist, alongside television and streaming food programming.
How mentions become a ranking
Restaurants are ordered by how many separate professional publications have written about them. Where two restaurants have the same number, the tiebreak weights the kind of recognition each mention represents — a Michelin star counts for more than an inclusion in a roundup — and the standing of the publication it came from.
We deliberately do not publish a precise numeric score. A number like “84 out of 100” implies a precision this data does not have, and invites comparisons between restaurants that a difference of two points cannot support. The count of publications is the honest unit: it is countable, checkable, and every mention behind it is listed on the restaurant's own page.
The ranking answers “how much do critics agree this place matters”. It does not claim to answer whether you will enjoy your dinner.
Where this data falls short
- Absence is not a verdict. A restaurant with no mentions has no critic coverage that we have found, and one without the badge simply has fewer than three. That is a statement about our data, not about the food. Excellent restaurants go unwritten-about all the time.
- Coverage is uneven by geography. Critic writing concentrates in large cities, so rankings in well-covered cities are far more meaningful than rankings in places critics rarely visit. Cities with too little data get no ranking page at all rather than a misleading one.
- Critics have their own biases. Professional coverage skews towards expensive, central, and newly-opened restaurants. Ranking by critic attention inherits every one of those biases.
- Data goes stale. Restaurants close, chefs move, and guides update on their own schedules. Each page shows when its data was last refreshed; treat anything older than a few months with suspicion.
- Mentions are gathered automatically. Discovery is automated, so it can miss coverage or occasionally attribute a mention to the wrong restaurant where names are similar.
Using this data elsewhere
If you quote a score or a ranking, please attribute it to Yoomami and link the restaurant or city page it came from, so readers can see the mentions behind the number.