The problem with a perfect ten
A new restaurant can receive one glowing rating and instantly appear above a place that has earned dozens of strong scores. The average is honest, but the order can still be misleading.
That matters on a discovery map. A leaderboard should reward excitement without pretending that one opinion carries the same certainty as a broader community signal.
What the list does now
We still display the raw community average. For the order of the list, we begin new restaurants near a neutral eight out of ten and reduce that influence as more people rate them.
Nothing is hidden: places with fewer than three ratings are marked New. A brilliant newcomer can climb quickly, while established favorites are less likely to be displaced by a single outlier.
Rankings should stay understandable
The method is intentionally simple. Every visitor contributes one current rating per restaurant, and changing a rating replaces the earlier one. The goal is not mathematical theater—it is a list that becomes more useful as the community grows.