Method
How we score
One question sits behind every number on Honest Nibbles: would we go back? This page shows how we turn that into a score out of 100, and what the score leaves out on purpose.
What we judge
Three things, each out of 100
- Food taste
- How good was the food itself?
- Quality / consistency
- Ingredients, execution, and would it be this good next time?
- Vibe
- Room, service, music, the feeling of being there.
Each crew member scores the three on their own. A review’s score is the average of the ones they could judge. If someone didn’t try enough to judge one, it’s marked undetermined and left out of the average, rather than guessed.
A spot’s crew score is the average of its crew reviews.
Cost is never part of the score, but it’s always noted. Every review says what was spent, so you know what to expect. A $9 roti and a $90 tasting menu answer the same question.
The tiers
Five words for five bands
The tier word comes first, the number underneath. “Worth a detour” tells you what to do; the 82 under it tells you how close it came.
| Tier | Score | Spots |
|---|---|---|
| Worth crossing townCross the city for it. | 90–100 | 0%0 spots |
| Worth a detourGo out of your way for it. | 75–89 | 0%0 spots |
| Worth a stopGood if it's on your route. | 60–74 | 0%0 spots |
| If you're already thereFine nearby. Don't plan a trip around it. | 40–59 | 0%0 spots |
| Skip itWe wouldn't go back. | 0–39 | 0%0 spots |
No spots have a crew score yet. The shares appear here once the first review is in.
The top band is rare, and it should be. We aim to keep “Worth crossing town” to about one spot in ten or fewer. A 90 means we’d cross the city for it, and we don’t say that lightly.
The idea of measuring a meal by how far you’d travel for it is borrowed, with thanks, from the Michelin Guide’s 1936 ladder of “worth a stop”, “worth a detour” and “worth a special journey”. Our tiers are our own, and they aren’t Michelin stars or connected to Michelin in any way.
Stars
Stars are the score divided by 20
We round to the nearest half star. Stars always sit next to the number, never on their own.
- 93/1004.5 stars
- 84/1004 stars
- 58/1003 stars
Agreement
When the crew disagrees, we say so
When more than one of us has reviewed a spot, the spot page shows how far apart our scores are: the gap between the highest and lowest crew score.
- Crew agrees
- 10 points or less
- Some debate
- 11 to 24 points
- Crew split
- 25 points or more
The seal
The HN seal marks 90 and up, only
The square green HN seal appears only on spots with a crew score of 90 or more: the ones we’d cross town for. It isn’t a decoration, it can’t be bought, and a spot loses it if its score drops below 90.
Two voices
Crew score and Diners’ score, kept apart
Crew score
Ours. Written by the crew, who pay for every meal. It’s the headline number on every spot.
Diners’ score
From readers who rate a spot after they sign in with Google. It has its own section on the spot page, and shows on cards only once a spot has 5 ratings.
We never average the two together. When they differ a lot, the spot page says so. That difference is useful: it tells you the crew and other diners see a place differently.
Diners’ ratings follow the guidelines. A rating marked “Signed in with Google” means the person has a Google account. It doesn’t mean we checked their visit.
The Google rating is a link, not a score
On a spot page we may show its Google rating with the date we noted it, like “4.6 on Google, noted Sep 2026”, and a link to the reviews on Google. It’s there for reference. It never feeds into our scores, and it never appears on our map or cards.
What never counts
Things that can’t move a score
Reader support. Delivery commissions. A restaurant asking for a better score, or complaining about a bad one. None of these can change a number. What can is another visit: when we go back, the review is updated and dated.