Table Stakes · Ranking Engine

Chicago Restaurants, Ranked

A weighted composite of crowd ratings and editorial awards. Crowd scores are shrunk toward the city mean so a 5.0 with eleven reviews cannot outrank a 4.6 with three thousand. Every weight below is yours to move.

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Weights
What the masses rate it, after shrinkage.
Michelin, James Beard, and any list you add.
How many independent sources agree it belongs.
Crowd rating
Set to 0.00 to drop Yelp out of the composite while still showing its rating on each card. Yelp's display terms say their rating must stand alone rather than feed an aggregate score, so zero is the compliant setting once another crowd source is live.
Weight of a Google rating in the composite. Only matters once a Google key is set.
Foursquare rates 0–10 from check-ins rather than written reviews, so it measures visits more than opinions.
Tripadvisor skews toward visitors, so turning this down favours places locals rate well.
Higher is more sceptical of thin review counts.
Never drops a place that appears on an editorial list.
Editorial
Higher means one serious award is nearly enough alone.
How fast an older award fades. 1.00 means never.
Penalties
Applied at + locations under one name.
High volume, zero editorial, inside a tourist zone.
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Method

score = 100 × (wcrowd·crowd + wed·editorial + wcons·consensus) × (1 − penalties). Components are 0–1 before weighting and the weights are normalised, so only their ratio matters. Crowd uses Bayesian shrinkage toward the city mean. Editorial credit saturates as 1 − e−s·credits, so five weak listicles never out-vote one serious award. Settings persist in this browser.

Ratings and review counts are supplied per source and each chip links back to that platform's own listing: Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Places data powered by Google. Tripadvisor bubble ratings are shown using Tripadvisor's own rating image. The composite score is this site's own calculation and is not endorsed by, or attributable to, any of them. Editorial signal is hand-compiled from the Michelin Guide and James Beard Foundation awards and may contain errors. Dining tier comes from price level, with a Michelin star overriding it.