How do you decide where to eat?

Most tools hand you a ranked list of thirty restaurants, which moves the work rather than doing it. Savor Scout takes your craving and location and returns one restaurant, showing its match score, what it beat, and the evidence behind the pick.

How do you pick a restaurant as a group?

Savor Scout group rooms turn it into a 90-second vote. The host shares a link, everyone taps yes on anything they would eat, and each person gets one veto to remove an option for the group. When two options remain the vetoes stop and votes decide. No app or signup is needed.

Yes. Searching and group rooms are free, no app download is required, and you can run one search without creating an account.

How is Savor Scout different from Google Maps or Yelp?

Maps and Yelp are directories that rank everything and leave the deciding to you. Savor Scout makes the call. It reads menus and reviews for the specific dish you asked about rather than ranking places by overall star average, and it shows its reasoning. Its place data comes from the same public sources, so the difference is the selection, not the data.

Savor Scout › Where the data comes from

Where the data comes from

Savor Scout publishes figures about 1,000 US cities and 627 university campuses. Every one of them comes from a public government dataset, and this page says which, for which year, and what they do not tell you.

Restaurant counts

The counts on the city pages come from County Business Patterns, an annual US Census Bureau series that counts business establishments by industry code. We use the 2022 release and four NAICS codes:

722511 — full-service restaurants, where you sit down and someone takes an order.
722513 — limited-service: counter service, fast food, takeaway.
722515 — snack and non-alcoholic beverage bars: coffee shops, juice counters, ice cream.
722410 — drinking places, many of which serve food.

County Business Patterns is published at county level, which is the finest geography the Census releases it for. So when a page says a number, it is describing the county the city sits in, and it says so. We do not present a county figure as a city figure, because that would be untrue and because anybody who lives there would know it.

Cities are matched to counties with the Census Geocoder, using the city's own coordinates. Where the Census suppresses a figure for disclosure reasons the category is left out rather than recorded as zero — reporting no restaurants in a county that has some would be worse than saying nothing.

Population and income

County population and median household income are from the American Community Survey 5-year estimates (2022). City populations come from a separate Census places dataset. The national comparison figure — currently 19.4 food businesses per 10,000 residents — is the median across the 469 counties our covered cities actually sit in, not across all ~3,100 US counties. A median dominated by rural counties with four restaurants would be technically accurate and useless as a comparison.

Campus data

Campus name, city, state, coordinates, size bracket and setting all come from IPEDS, the US Department of Education's annual survey of institutions, accessed through the Urban Institute's open Education Data API. Public domain.

Student numbers are given as the IPEDS size bracket rather than an exact headcount, because the bracket is what the public dataset provides. We would rather quote the survey than estimate around it. Online divisions and multi-campus districts are excluded: their listed address is an administrative office, so a page about the food near it would be misleading.

What these numbers are not

They count businesses, not quality. A county with 400 restaurants is not necessarily a better place to eat than one with 120 — it is a bigger one. Nothing here is a ranking, and no page on this site claims a particular restaurant is the best anything.

Savor Scout does not hold a restaurant database. When you run a search, it queries live place data at that moment, reads menus and reviews for what you actually asked for, and returns one result with its reasoning. It does not store or republish those listings, which is why these pages tell you how many restaurants a place has without naming them.

Government data also lags. County Business Patterns for 2022 was collected in 2022 and published later, so a restaurant that opened last month is not in it, and one that closed last year may still be.

Dietary and allergy information

The dietary guides are written from public guidance and from how restaurant kitchens actually work. They are not medical advice, and the matching in the app reads what restaurants and reviewers have written — it is a way to find places worth calling, not a safety check. Every allergy page says so in its own words.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, it is because we have reproduced a public dataset incorrectly or because the dataset itself is out of date — both worth knowing about. The underlying sources are linked above so anything on this site can be checked against them.

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