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What to eat
What to do when you can't decide where to eat
Nobody is short of restaurants. The problem is that every tool built for this hands you thirty options ranked by a number that has almost nothing to do with whether you personally want to eat there tonight.
A star rating is an average of strangers' experiences across every possible reason for visiting. A 4.6 taqueria and a 4.6 steakhouse are not comparable, and neither number tells you which one is right for a Tuesday when you are tired and want something sour. The rating is real. It is just answering a different question than the one you have.
The deeper issue is that the list format shifts the work onto you at the exact moment you have the least appetite for work. Choosing between thirty things is harder than choosing between two, and dramatically harder than being handed one and asked whether it is wrong. This is why “where do you want to go” produces silence and “is Thai okay” produces an answer in two seconds.
So the reliable methods all do the same thing: they shrink the field before you engage with it, rather than after.
Three methods, roughly in order of how well they work:
- Name the sensation, not the cuisine — “Something crispy and spicy” narrows the field faster than “Asian food” and is easier to answer honestly. A cuisine is a category; a craving is a constraint.
- Let something else make the first cut — The point of a picker is not that a machine has better taste than you. It is that reacting to one concrete suggestion is a much easier task than generating one from nothing — and if it is wrong, you will know instantly and know why.
- Veto instead of vote, in a group — Asking five people to name a restaurant produces five answers and no decision. Asking five people to remove the one thing they would not eat produces a shortlist in one round.
Try this search
Savor Scout takes a sentence rather than a category, so the criteria above can go straight into the box. For this, something like “something crispy and spicy, nearby” works — it reads menus and reviews for those specific things and comes back with one place and the reasons it picked it.
What usually goes wrong
Do not open a second app. The problem was never insufficient options. And do not put it to an open vote in a group chat — an open vote is how you get four suggestions and a ninety-minute thread.