The masthead
Eat where the
locals eat.
Top Tier is an opinionated food publication. Every ranking you read here is filed by people who actually live in the city, then assembled into a public consensus.
Most restaurant reviews are gameable, anonymous, or worse: algorithmic. We started Top Tier because food recommendations from someone who’s tasted everything in a category outrank a 4.3-star average from strangers, every time. The mechanic is the simplest version of that idea — your top five places, ranked, in a category, in a city.
Lists are personal. Consensus is the public crystallization of all of them. Editorial picks sit alongside the consensus so when there’s a canon worth pointing at, we point.
Three lanes
What you’ll read here
- №1
The City Consensus
Per (city, category), every public Top 5 is blended with recency, depth, and visit-signal weighting into a single ranking. The full method is in how the consensus works; the short version is that fresh, deep, on-the-ground rankings count for more than stale ones.
- №2
Top 5s from the community
Individual curator lists, newest first. Same data the consensus is built from, but with the curator’s name on it. You’ll find people whose taste you trust faster than you’d trust any algorithm.
- №3
Editorial picks
Sourced from the cities’ most-trusted food publications and signed off by the editorial desk. Cited inline. Never paid for, never traded for.
The rules
What we don’t do
No paid placements.
Restaurants can’t buy a higher rank, a verified badge, or anything else.
No engagement-bait notifications.
At most one a week. No streaks, no daily nags.
No ads in the content flow.
Ever.
No selling user data.
Read the privacy policy. We collect what we need to make the consensus work, and nothing else.
No dark patterns on sharing.
Share a list, get a list. No friend-spam, no contact-import nags.
Reach us
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, restaurant closures, takedown requests, press: write us at support@toptiereats.app. The full support page lives at /support.
Add to the record
Build your own Top 5.
No app needed — build it right here. Your picks publish to your profile and roll into the consensus on every page.