How Guiding Post works

Our methodology, our disclosures, and what you can expect from us.

Most restaurant recommendations on the internet come from one of two places — an aggregator averaging together millions of strangers' stars, or a local blog accepting a free dinner in exchange for a blurb. We do neither. What follows is how we actually work, so you know what you're reading when you read us.

Who writes this

Guiding Post is written by a CIA Hyde Park graduate with eight years on the line in professional kitchens, currently living in the coverage area and eating out several nights a week. Every piece that goes up carries a byline and a credential. We don't publish anonymous reviews and we don't use AI to generate editorial content — the voice you're reading is a person's.

AI does quietly help us in the background — keeping restaurant hours and phone numbers current, researching James Beard and Michelin recognitions against the awarding bodies' published records, surfacing which neighborhoods and cuisines we haven't yet covered. That work is infrastructure, not voice, and no machine-written text reaches the page.

How we eat

We pay for every meal. No comps. No press dinners. No free tastings. No invited events where the food is waiting at the table when we arrive. If the restaurant recognizes us and sends out something extra, we note it in our records and weight the experience accordingly — and in a contested case, we'll order a second visit where we aren't recognized to check our read.

Every Review is based on at least two visits. One meal isn't a restaurant; it's a snapshot of a restaurant on one night. Before a piece labeled The Review goes live, we've eaten there at least twice, ideally across different days and different sections of the menu.

Regulars are already regular. Pieces labeled The Regular are written about places we've eaten at many times — the neighborhood rotation, the reliable takeout, the spot we're at on a Tuesday when we aren't working on a review. We aren't pretending to be strangers at these places, and we'll tell you so.

How we decide what to cover

Guiding Post is deliberately curated, which means two things.

First, what we include is a recommendation. If we've written about a restaurant, we think it's worth your time and money in the specific frame the piece describes. That's the meaning of our coverage. We don't run reviews of places we wouldn't eat at ourselves.

Second, what we leave out is a message too. If a place in the coverage area hasn't shown up on the site after a year, it's usually because we didn't think it met the bar for a Review or the honest affection of a Regular. We don't publish pans of sleepy neighborhood restaurants — that's punching at nothing, and it's not what we're here for. The handful of exceptions each year are pieces about places with genuine regional buzz, where a lot of readers are actively asking “is it worth it?” — and in those rare cases, we'll give you an honest answer in the same format and the same voice as everything else.

Our two editorial formats

The Review is for destinations — the restaurants worth making a plan around, worth driving for, worth booking ahead. These are 500–650 words and they close with Perfect for, Worth the drive, and Where to start.

The Regular is for rotation — the places we actually eat at on weeknights and family nights, honestly described, including what keeps them from being destinations. These are shorter, around 300–440 words, and they close with What you're here for, When to go, and an honest note that tells you what a Regular is and isn't.

Both formats use the same standard of honesty. The difference is what question the piece is answering: “where should I make a plan to go?” versus “where do people who know this area actually eat?”

We don't use stars. We don't use scores. We don't rank our guides from 1 to 10. If you want to know what we think of a place, the piece will tell you in sentences.

Conflicts of interest

The area's food community isn't that big, which means the founder has professional and personal relationships with people in it. Our rules:

If we know a chef or owner professionally or personally, we disclose it in the piece itself.
If the relationship is close — a current collaborator, a good friend, a family member — we don't review the restaurant. Someone else does, or the piece doesn't run.
If someone we know opens a place and we want to cover it, we'll say so at the top of the piece and you can weigh it accordingly.

We take sponsored content occasionally — posts clearly labeled as such, written to be useful to you, visually distinct from editorial. A restaurant that sponsors a post does not get a review. A restaurant that got a critical contrarian take cannot buy their way out of it with a sponsorship. The firewall is absolute, and if it ever feels like it isn't, tell us.

We do not take payment for inclusion in any guide or best-of list. Not now, not ever. Pay-to-play is the specific thing that makes most “top 10” lists worthless, and if we did it, we'd be worthless too.

Reservations, links, and affiliates

We don't run reservation affiliate links. No OpenTable, no Resy, no Tock. The founder doesn't personally use those platforms, and we'd rather give you the restaurant's own phone number and website than collect a few dollars when you click through.

We do run display advertising, and we may run related-product affiliate links (cookbooks, kitchen tools, wine) when the recommendation genuinely aligns with the piece. If we're making money on a link, we'll say so.

Our newsletter carries occasional sponsorships from local businesses that aren't subjects of our editorial coverage. Clearly labeled. Firewall-separated from the writing.

Corrections

We make mistakes. Hours change. Chefs move. A dish we loved on two visits turns into something else on a third. When we get something wrong — a factual error, an outdated detail, an observation we've since come to disagree with — we correct it in place on the original piece, with a dated note at the bottom of the page. We don't silently edit. If it mattered enough to publish, it matters enough to correct transparently.

If you catch something we got wrong, the fastest way to reach us is the contact page. We'll read it.

The short version

We pay for our meals. We visit more than once. We don't take comps, don't run reservation affiliate links, and don't let anyone pay to appear in our guides. We write about places we'd actually go, and the silence on places we haven't written about means what you think it means. We're a credentialed chef pointing you at the restaurants worth your time, and we're trying to be the publication that earns your trust by being honest about how we work.

Thanks for reading.

Last updated: April 2026.