If your review was not published

Every review goes through a check before it appears. It is not there to soften criticism — a one-star review of a bad meal is exactly the kind of thing this site is for. It is there to keep out the things that make review sites useless: fake praise, personal attacks, and complaints about the wrong restaurant.

What happens after you press send

Your review is screened within moments. Most are published straight away. Some are held for a person to read, usually because the wording is borderline rather than wrong. You will see the state on the review itself, and you will be told when it goes live.

The usual reasons one is held back

• Named individuals or insults. Describe what happened, not who to blame. "We waited fifty minutes for the mains" is publishable; an attack on a named waiter is not.
• It is not about the food or the visit. Reviews are for your own experience of that restaurant. Rumours, politics and complaints about a delivery app do not belong here.
• It reads as promotion. Discount codes, links, phone numbers and marketing copy get refused.
• No detail at all. A rating with a single word tells nobody anything. A couple of sentences is enough.
• Wrong restaurant. Easy to do when two branches share a name — check the town at the top of the page.
• A serious accusation. Food poisoning, hygiene, safety. We take these seriously, which is exactly why they get read by a person first.

Fixing it

Open the review, edit the part that was flagged and send it again. You do not lose the text, and resubmitting does not count against you.

Reviews are one per restaurant

You write one review per place, and you can revisit and update it later — helpful when a restaurant improves, or slips.

If you disagree with the outcome

Write to us with the restaurant's name. A person will read it. We change our minds when we are wrong, and we would rather do that than lose your trust.

And if a review about your visit is unfair

Restaurants can reply publicly and can flag a review for review. Diners can flag one too. Enough credible flags take it off the page while a person looks.