About the guides
How we write these guides
The site says in a lot of places that nothing here is paid for. This is the page that explains what that means in practice, and what we do when we get something wrong.
- Guides
- 20
- Countries
- 7
- Places written up
- 312 places
- We can book
- 185 places
Six things worth knowing
We write them ourselves
Every line is written by the people who answer the concierge messages. A guide goes up once we can stand behind every recommendation in it, which is why there are twenty of them and not two hundred.
Research is not publication
We use the same tools anyone does to find candidates, including Google's place data. We do not republish it: no ratings, no review counts, no borrowed descriptions. What you read is our own line on the place, and the part a score cannot tell you is usually the point.
Nobody paid to be in here
No sponsored listings, no affiliate ranking, no partner restaurants. A place is in a guide because we would send a friend there — and it is the same list the concierge books from, so we have to live with the booking.
“We can book this” means we can book it
That badge appears only where reservations genuinely exist. Some of the best entries here take none — a street-food counter, a corniche, a viewpoint at dusk — and we would rather say nothing than make a promise the desk has to walk back.
Updated means a person read it again
The date on a guide is the day someone reviewed the whole thing, not the day a file changed. Kitchens close and prices move; a guide nobody has re-read is a guide quietly going wrong.
The map pins are approximate
Some are neighbourhood centres rather than doorways, accurate to a few hundred metres. Wherever that is true the map says so on the page. A pin implies a precision it does not always have.
Think we are wrong about a place?
Tell us. A guide that nobody argues with is usually a guide nobody has used. Corrections go to the same desk that answers the bookings, and they reach the person who wrote the entry.
Message Simly Concierge