Methodology
Everything on this site is computed from public review data, re-harvested and re-verified in full on every run (current run: August 2026). No restaurant pays for placement; no score can be bought.
Sources
- Naver Place — visitor review score and volume, blog/café review volume, menus with prices. The dominant Korean review platform; volumes routinely 10–100× the others.
- KakaoMap — star rating and count, blog review count, menus, price level. Korea's second local signal; Naver Place itself no longer shows star ratings, so Kakao supplies the numeric local star.
- Google Places — rating and review count. The tourist verdict: the overwhelming majority of visitors to Korea rate restaurants here.
Matching
The Kakao listing is the anchor (name, both address forms, coordinates). The same branch is located on Naver and Google by name similarity plus coordinate distance — matches beyond 400 m are rejected, so a same-named branch across town can't pollute a score. Match confidence is stored per record and shipped in the open dataset.
The scores
- Local score = weighted blend of Naver visitor score (2×) and Kakao rating (1×), 0–5.
- Tourist score = Google rating, 0–5.
- Gap Score = tourist − local. Positive = tourists rate it higher than locals; negative = locals rate it higher.
- Qualification: gap badges require ≥100 reviews on both sides. 230 of 362 listed restaurants currently qualify.
- Buzz = log₁₀ of total local review volume — how much locals talk about a place, independent of sentiment. District pages sort by it.
Badges
- Trap alert: gap ≥ +0.45 · Tourist-tilted: +0.20 to +0.44
- Aligned: −0.19 to +0.19
- Local favorite: −0.20 to −0.44 · Hidden gem: gap ≤ −0.45
Caveats we're honest about
- Platform cultures differ: Korean reviewers grade harder than Google's global average. The gap measures disagreement, not objective quality.
- Kakao star ratings skew low on famous places (locals rate the queue, not just the food). That's part of the signal, not a bug — but it's why Naver gets 2× weight.
- Cafés and dessert bars are excluded from v1 — this is a restaurants index.
- TripAdvisor is not yet included; it's on the roadmap as a second tourist signal.
- Menu prices are as listed on Naver/Kakao at harvest time and can lag reality by a few weeks.
Verification
Every record carries the date it was last checked and whether its Naver page is live. Closed restaurants stay in the dataset (flagged) rather than silently vanishing — a public closures ledger is coming with the next data drop.