The Map Is Not the Morning

A directory can tell you what exists, roughly where it is, when it claims to open and what somebody wrote about it. That is genuinely useful and it is also the whole of what it knows. It does not know that the good baker left in March, that the terrace is unusable when the wind comes off the water, or that the place is wonderful except on the two days a week the owner is not there.

This site adds one more layer and is explicit about what that layer is: position on the list is bought. A cafe sits where it sits because somebody paid to put it there, the amount is printed on the card, and anyone can pay a dollar more to move a different one above it. That is a measure of who cared enough to spend, which is real information, and it is not a measure of the eggs.

Using both kinds of knowledge

Use the list for the things lists are good at: what is within a radius, what is open now, what has a website you can check. Use people for everything else. The person behind the counter of a place you already like will tell you where they eat on their day off, and that answer beats every ranking ever published.

The honest version of a recommendation site is one that tells you where its knowledge stops. Ours stops at the door. Inside is a room with people in it, and no amount of structured data has ever described one of those accurately.