Frequently asked questions.

Every restaurant on the site is sourced from the OpenStreetMap Overpass API, a global open mapping database maintained by tens of thousands of volunteer contributors worldwide. For each city we cover, we query Overpass for points tagged as amenity=restaurant or amenity=fast_food that also carry a cuisine tag, within roughly 5.5 km of the city center. The structured fields you see on each page (name, address, cuisine, opening hours where they exist) come straight from that mapping data and are licensed under the Open Database License.

The dataset is re-pulled in batches as we expand coverage, typically when we add a new city to the list. Restaurant snapshots therefore get refreshed every few weeks rather than every few minutes, which is the right trade-off for a directory of this size. The footer on every page shows the date the underlying data file was last generated, so you always know how fresh the snapshot is. If a specific listing has changed and the OpenStreetMap data has not caught up yet, your best move is to call the restaurant directly to confirm hours or availability.

The recommended badge is reserved for the strongest entries in the directory and is computed from a blend of the underlying rating signal and a consistency factor. We do not accept paid placement, and recommendations cannot be purchased. The full ranking logic, including how price tier and "open late" status are derived, is documented on the methodology page.

A restaurant will only appear in MenuScout if it meets three conditions in the underlying mapping data: it has an amenity tag set to either restaurant or fast food, it carries a cuisine tag, and it sits within roughly 5.5 km of one of the city centers we currently cover. If a place is missing, one of those three is usually the reason. The most common case is that the OpenStreetMap entry exists but lacks a cuisine tag, which you can fix yourself in a couple of minutes on openstreetmap.org. Once the cuisine tag is added, the entry will show up on MenuScout the next time we refresh the city.

If the issue is with the underlying restaurant data (address is wrong, restaurant is closed, hours have changed), the fastest fix is to edit the entry on openstreetmap.org directly. Those changes flow into the MenuScout data on the next refresh. If the issue is with our editorial summary or the cross-linking on the site, use the contact page to send us a note and we will address it manually.

The fast-casual category sits in an awkward middle slice of the restaurant world: too thoughtful to be lumped in with traditional fast food, but too quick and informal to show up in most fine-dining coverage. The result is a category that is genuinely underserved by major restaurant directories, even though it accounts for an enormous share of how people actually eat in US cities. MenuScout exists because we think it deserves a directory that takes it seriously.

The directory includes both independent operators and regional chains, but we do not aim to list every national fast-food location in the country. Where a chain happens to appear in OpenStreetMap with a cuisine tag and falls inside one of our city queries, it shows up like any other entry. The intent of the directory, though, is to surface places that someone scanning for a good lunch would not have already found through a national chain locator.

Editorial copy on MenuScout is generated by a structured templating layer that varies opener, menu emphasis, vibe, and value framing based on cuisine, city, and restaurant attributes. That keeps every page substantive without requiring a human writer per restaurant. We treat the editorial layer as a baseline that any single page can be rewritten on top of, and we prioritize hand-rewrites for the highest-traffic city and cuisine pages over time.

The underlying restaurant facts (name, address, cuisine, hours) are sourced from OpenStreetMap and licensed under the Open Database License, which allows redistribution with attribution. Editorial content on MenuScout (the multi-paragraph summaries, the city overviews, the cuisine essays) is not open-licensed. If you want to syndicate or republish editorial content, ask first via the contact page.

No. Editorial placement is not for sale. Display advertising slots exist in the page template but are clearly delineated and are served by an external ad network. Sponsorship of an individual restaurant page would compromise the trust signal we are trying to build, so we do not offer it.