Why I’m building Vota

There is a pizzeria near my apartment in Copenhagen with 4.7 stars. Geranium, three Michelin stars, also has 4.7. I like the pizzeria. It is not Geranium.

That is the whole problem in one line. When every place worth visiting sits between 4.0 and 4.7, the number has stopped telling you anything. You are left doing what you always did, which is asking a friend.

There are two reasons the ratings ended up this way.

The first is who pays. On the big platforms, the restaurant is the customer. Yelp made about 95% of its revenue in 2025 from advertising sold to the businesses it lists. Google is no different. Maps is an advertising business, and that is how they make their money. When the restaurant pays, the rating drifts toward the restaurant.

The second is the scale itself. Grading a meal from 1 to 5 is genuinely hard. Nobody knows quite what a 3 means, so everyone gives a 4 or a 5 and the whole scale collapses into a narrow band at the top.

Michelin gets quality right. Their inspectors are rigorous and the ratings mean something. But they cover about 15,000 restaurants in the world, roughly 0.1%. Your local kebab shop is never getting an inspector. It deserves an honest rating anyway.

So we built Vota differently. You do not grade a restaurant. You are shown two places you have been to and you pick the one you liked more. That is a question anyone can answer in a second, and you can answer it consistently. Enough of those comparisons, run through an ELO-style model, and you get a score from 1 to 100 for every restaurant. The full scale, in use.

The other decision was the business model, and we made it before we wrote any code. Vota takes no advertising, no sponsorships, and no paid placements. No restaurant can pay us for anything, at any price. Our only revenue is Vota Premium, paid by diners.

That leaves Vota genuinely independent, and I do not know of another restaurant guide that can say it. The big platforms are paid by the restaurants they rate. Michelin is funded by Michelin and by tourism boards that pay to have their region inspected. Every guide is paid by someone, and whoever pays is who the guide serves. We wanted that to be you, so we built the company that way from day one.

I spent fifteen years building Vivino, where 75 million people now rate wine. It worked because people were willing to share what they actually thought, and because we never sold them out. I am doing the same thing for food.

Compare the restaurants you know. Vota will show you the ones you should know.