Editorial standards
How we verify
Most of what you can read about where to eat in Bangkok is either a restaurant's own promotion or a review written years ago that nobody went back to. Bangkok Foodie works differently: 403 restaurants across 25 neighbourhoods, and every fact on every page can tell you where it came from and when it was checked.
- 403restaurants that meet the standard
- 2,297cited sources
- 116guides (58 English · 58 Thai)
- 25neighbourhoods covered
This page explains how the guides and restaurant pages are put together: what a restaurant has to clear before it appears, the record we keep on each one, and how every guide is checked before it goes live. It is written by the Bangkok Foodie Editorial Team. We publish under one team byline on purpose. The standard is the same whoever does the work, and it does not shift because a particular name is on the page.
The bar
What a restaurant has to clear before it is listed
Plenty of sites call a restaurant "recommended" without saying what that is based on. Here a restaurant gets its own page, and a place in a guide, only after four things are established, and it keeps that place only while they stay true:
- It can be found. Name, address and map position come from the restaurant's Google Maps business record, or from the restaurant's own pages or those of the mall it sits in. The English name is the one the restaurant itself uses on its sign, website or Google listing, not a romanisation we made up.
- Its menu can be confirmed. At least two dishes to order, each one taken from the restaurant's menu, its website or social accounts, or a named publication. A restaurant whose menu we cannot confirm from a checkable source is left out, however famous it is.
- Its price has evidence. A per-head price appears only when a source supports it. The band is set from the midpoint of that price: $ up to 200 baht, $$ up to 500, $$$ up to 1,500, $$$$ above that. A restaurant with no price evidence shows no band at all. A blank is better than a guess.
- Awards and ratings come from where they are given. Michelin stars and Bib Gourmands are confirmed on the restaurant's Michelin Guide page, with the edition year (34 restaurants at the moment). The rating you see is Google's, always shown with its review count, and never presented as ours.
When any of those stops being true, because a restaurant closes or moves, its status changes to closed or temporarily closed, its page leaves the site and the sitemap, and the site will not build while any guide still lists it. A stale listing that sends someone to a shuttered door is worse than no listing.
The record
What we keep on every restaurant
Behind each restaurant page is a structured record, and the page reads straight from it. None of these fields is decoration:
- Sources, datedEvery link we used, what it confirmed, and the day we read it, listed at the foot of every restaurant page. Across all 403 restaurants that is 2,297 citations.
- Updated dateThe last day the restaurant's record was edited, shown under its name. Check it before you trust a price or an opening time.
- Google rating dateRatings and review counts move daily, so the date we pulled them is kept separately from the rest of the record.
- Visit recordFilled in only when the team has actually been, with the date and what was ordered. Where we have not been, the field is empty, and nothing on the page says "we tried". We do not invent an anecdote to make a page sound lived-in.
The rule is the same for every field: it is filled only when it is true. We would rather show less and be believed than pad a page with detail we cannot stand behind.
Guides
How a guide is made
A restaurant page answers "what is this place". A guide answers "I'm in this neighbourhood, at this mall, or planning this kind of meal: where should I go". Every guide goes through the same stages, and only the last one is ever published:
- Search data
- Brief
- Draft
- Checks
- Published
- It starts from what people search. Each guide begins with Google search-volume data. English guides are written from English searches and Thai guides from Thai searches, separately from the start. Neither is a translation of the other.
- Every listed restaurant meets the bar. The site will not build if a published guide lists a restaurant that has not cleared the four checks above, and a guide needs at least eight restaurants and four answered questions before it can publish.
- Its own sources are recorded. Where a guide relies on an outside reference, such as a mall's tenant list or an awards list, that source is kept with the date it was read. Prices and dishes in a guide come from the same records as the restaurant pages.
- Drafts never render. A guide that is not finished does not appear on the site at all. There are no half-written "coming soon" pages.
How the order is decided
The editorial team orders each guide by hand, weighing three things: Google rating and review volume; fit with what the guide is for (a riverside guide asks whether a place is actually on the water or just has a river view from a tower); and the weight of the evidence, such as a confirmed Michelin award. The district pages under restaurants near me are not ordered by hand: they use Google rating multiplied by the log of the review count, so a 4.9 with 12 reviews does not jump a 4.6 with 3,000.
Reading a page
How to read a restaurant page
Every restaurant page carries the same signals in the same places. Once you know what each one means you can size a place up in seconds, and you know what to confirm with the restaurant before you go.
- Google ratingFor example "Google 4.6 · 1,230 reviews". A high score on a handful of reviews means less than a middling score on hundreds. Read the two numbers together.
- Price band$ to $$$$ on the scale above, with a per-head figure in baht when a source gives one. No evidence, no band. Prices move, so confirm before you go.
- UpdatedThe last time the record was edited. The older it is, the more worth a phone call the opening hours are.
- MichelinAward level and edition year, for example Bib Gourmand 2026. No line means no award we could confirm.
- What to orderEvery item comes from a source listed at the foot of the page, not from our guess at what sounds good.
- Appears in these guidesEach guide that lists the restaurant, and its rank there.
Independence
Where we stand
Bangkok Foodie is independent. A restaurant cannot buy a listing, a rank or a rating. The order on our pages comes from the data and the judgement described above, not from who paid.
There are things we deliberately do not do, and they are part of the standard:
- We do not publish Google's rating as our own rating in the structured data we give search engines. We show the numbers for context; we do not dress them up as our certification.
- We do not run an anonymous review box. A review box a site controls is a review box a site can quietly edit.
- We do not invent critics, editors or tasting visits. The byline is the team, and the trust comes from a record you can check, not from a face.
Corrections
Found something out of date?
The quickest way to keep this accurate is a reader who has just walked out of a restaurant. If a price has moved, the hours are wrong, a dish has gone or a place has closed, email the restaurant's name or page link and what you saw to [email protected]. We check it against the sources, fix the restaurant page, and move its updated date to the day of the fix.
Bangkok Foodie Editorial Team
We compile, verify and maintain every restaurant record and guide under one team byline. The English and Thai pages are written separately, each for the people who search in that language. Corrections and restaurant suggestions are always welcome; every one makes the next pass better.