Frequently Asked Questions

FoodTree is an insider restaurant recommendation platform built for diners who are tired of tourist traps and algorithmic lists. Every dish recommendation comes from chefs, sommeliers, and food critics — not paid placements — so you can trust what to order at restaurants across our eight cities.

Each pick is backed by a credibility score (0–100) drawn from published reviews by working chefs, sommeliers, and food critics in that city. We do not include picks based on single anonymous reviews, sponsored content, or generic aggregator scores; a recommendation has to be supported by at least one named expert who has actually eaten the dish.

Our 260 restaurants and the dishes on each one are sourced from published reviews, chef interviews, and on-the-ground reporting in each city. We pair each dish with the underlying review so you can see the actual quote behind a credibility score — no hallucinations, no scraped listicles.

You pick a city and we send a weekly email with three to six expert-backed dish picks — the same dishes a local chef would order off-menu. Subscriptions are free, you can switch cities at any time, and every pick links to the restaurant page so you can see the credibility score and review before you go.

There is no standalone mobile app today; everything runs on the web and through WhatsApp. The web pages are mobile-first, and our WhatsApp bot (text us a restaurant name and you get instant dish picks) covers the on-the-go case better than an app would.

A restaurant is added when at least one working chef, sommelier, or published food critic recommends it on the record. We also accept nominations from our subscribers — if there is a restaurant you trust that we have missed, email us and we will research it for inclusion.

A credibility score is the average rating across every qualifying expert review we have on file for that dish, normalized to a 0–100 scale. Dishes with one strong named review typically score in the 80s; dishes with multiple independent reviews in agreement can clear 95. We never weight a review by reach or follower count — only by the reviewer’s track record.