This is why the current restaurant reviews all suck. What I want is:

IMO what do most people do when talking about restaurants, especially in a group? Someone brings up restaurant X and THEN they say "I usually get dish X, but sometimes Y and Z." and then someone ELSE says "nah, don't get X there, go to restaurant A to get that. But I do like the Z they make there", and then someone ELSE has a different opinion like "oh you like X at A, have you tried X at C?".

The thing that's funny is that everyone has these opinions, and often they are pretty strong. Everyone is a critic.

And yet here we are after SquareWhatever and Google reviews and 20 years of faceyspaces and food instragram porn and we still can't get a decent response to some google thing like "best thai duck curry" (my benchmark dish for a thai restaurant, sorry cute ducks, but you are delicious in red curry sauce).

So why isn't there a site that reward people ranking their "top 5 places to get X dish" or top 5 places for cuisine style X", and then you can ask your social network "where should I get duck curry"?

And it tells you something like:

1) Thai Bistro Bubba (liked by 10 friends: molly peter jason)
2) Sing My Thai (like by 8 friends: blahg blah blah)

Maybe not even need people to have a ranking. Just track who leaves a good review about dish X on restaurant R. Cross ref the style.

Gamification of common dishes/styles shouldn't be that hard. People LIKE reviewing food, and telling people about it.

The economic tiers are a bit hard to do though.

And my frustration with a lot of reviews is that people seem to care about ambience and service a lot more than I do. Ambience is like 5% of an eating experience to me. Service? Well as long as the service is average with respect to demand and staffing, who cares, so maybe 10%. Other 85%? How it tastes (... with respect to how much it cost).

Square was close, but their gamification turned into badges.

And all restaurants are basically 3.5 to 4.5 on google. And places that I KNOW are far different in quality vary by maybe .1 to .2, if it's accurate.

The real tragedy is that the rapacious companies like UberEats and the like that are a pox on the takeout industry have all this info, and they probably won't release it. They have the orders, so they have the popularity, and tons of stuff like who will pay the most to have it delivered the most far.

Anyway, and I would LOVE a filter like "remove chain restaurants" or "show only better than chains". I would love to know if my friends or a trusted group of people had a floor for burritos to not bother if it's worse than Chipotle, which is not an astronomically high bar, but it is a good universal measurement.

Like this guy's data should not be in some one-off site. I've also see an chicago burrito site.

And as others have shown, I don't want a ranking of THE BEST in a city. I want a ranking of "pretty darn good" and a group to choose from.

Restaurants have it so hard. They kind of plop down and hope people come to them, but the people don't know what a restaurant does well. They do "Italian". great. Restaurants might do X better than Y, but the knowledge of that is so limited and fragmented. Open some sub-markets for specific dishes, and it might raise the overall quality of that, kind of like what has happened to the NYC slice of pizza, which is so universal over such a large number of people in an area, that it rose to an art that is well distributed and practiced.

I want that for a LOT of other dishes. Of course it should exist for the burrito, the hamburger. And especially for red duck curry.