Not enough insider data (yet)
Listed, not ranked — fewer than 5 fluent food reviews in the last 24 months.
How this works
We pull every Google review from the last 24 months for every Chinese restaurant in the Austin metro. A language model reads each one and keeps only reviews that are substantively about the food — complaints about service, prices, portions, or takeout logistics are discarded entirely.
Reviews only count when they show cuisine fluency: naming dishes with real execution detail ("wet-style chow fun", "proper wok hei"), comparing a dish to Hong Kong or Sichuan, writing in Chinese, ordering off the Chinese menu. We score what the review says — we never profile who wrote it.
Each qualifying review then gets a food-quality score out of 10 judged from the text itself — star ratings are ignored, so a rave about the roast duck counts even when the reviewer docked stars for parking. A restaurant's rating is the fluency-weighted average.
The ▲ climb badge compares our rank to the same restaurant's Google-rating rank. A big climb means fluent reviewers love a place Google buries — that gap is where the gems are.
Vietnamese & Thai are next
One email when each new list drops. Nothing else, ever.