About and honesty policy
I eat around Singapore, pay for it, and score each dish on one fixed rubric so dishes can be compared with each other.
My policy
- I pay for my own meals. The price shown on each dish is what I actually paid for it (see "Prices are nett" below).
- Comps are always disclosed. If a meal was free, discounted or I was invited, the place carries a visible "comp / invited" badge.
- No restaurant sponsorships. Nobody pays to be listed, ranked or reviewed here.
- Scores are my personal opinion of one dish on one visit. Kitchens change, off days happen, and your taste may differ. Please treat every score and verdict as my own view, not a statement of fact about the business.
- If you believe something I have written is factually wrong, tell me and I will check and correct it.
What is ranked: dishes
The ranked unit is the dish, not the restaurant. Each dish has a type (laksa, chicken rice, ramen and so on) and is ranked on its own leaderboard against the same dish elsewhere. Dishes of type "Other" are scored but not ranked. A place page lists every dish I have judged there, with an Order or Skip for each.
The rubric
Each dish gets a taste score and a value score from 1 to 10 (half points allowed). Each meal also gets one experience score, shared by every dish eaten on that visit. They combine with fixed weights:
| Score | Weight | What I look at |
|---|---|---|
| Taste | 60% | How good the dish actually is: flavour, texture, execution. Scored against the anchors below. |
| Value | 30% | Whether the portion and quality justify the price I paid. |
| Experience | 10% | Per meal, not per dish: service, queue, comfort, cleanliness. |
Overall = taste × 0.6 + value × 0.3 + experience × 0.1, rounded to one decimal. Ties are broken by taste, then by the earlier first visit. If an older entry has no experience score, taste and value are rescaled to fill the whole 10 points.
Taste anchors
Taste is one score with a fixed meaning at every level, so a 7 means the same thing for a bowl of laksa and a plate of pasta.
| Score | Anchor | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Inedible | Spoiled, burnt, or something's wrong with it |
| 2 | Barely touched it | |
| 3 | Wouldn't finish it | |
| 4 | Finished it, but disappointed | |
| 5 | Fine | Wouldn't order again |
| 6 | Decent | Wouldn't mind having it again |
| 7 | Would order again | |
| 8 | Would come back for this | |
| 9 | Would cross the island for it | |
| 10 | Best version I've had |
Half points use the anchor below them, so 7.5 reads as "Would order again".
Verdict: Order or Skip
Separate from the score, every dish gets one call: Order (I would tell a friend to get it) or Skip (I would not), given the taste, the price and the experience. It is my judgement and is not computed from the score. Place pages lead with these calls.
Prices are nett
The price on a dish is its nett price: that dish's proportional share of what was actually paid, including the 10% service charge and 9% GST and after any discounts. It is for the whole dish, not per person. So a dish listed at S$5 on a bill that came to S$23.80 on a S$20 subtotal shows as S$5.95. Prices are optional: a dish without one shows "—" and is left out of every value ranking.
Other numbers
- Bang for buck = dish overall ÷ nett dish price × 10, i.e. points per S$10. Priced dishes only.
- Flavour profile (spicy, salty, sweet, sour, umami, rich, portion) is shown from 0 to 3 bars when I record it. It describes the dish and is not part of the score.
- Anything off? chips (served cold, overcooked, too salty, not fresh, small portion) flag problems that I noticed. They are not part of the score either.
- Place overall = the mean of its dishes' overalls from my most recent visit. It orders places on the area, region and category pages.
- Hype gap = a place's overall minus twice its Google rating (to put both on a 10-point scale). Negative means my score is lower than the crowd's (overhyped, in my view); positive means higher (underrated, in my view).
Rank history
Each new visit can re-rank the dishes. The Top page keeps a snapshot at every visit date, so you can see how each dish moved up and down within its type over time.