How the numbers work
Last updated September 2, 2026
Every number on an OrderInsider menu comes from guests naming what they ordered. Nothing on this site is an opinion of ours, an editor’s pick, or something a restaurant paid for. This page is the whole rule set, in the order it gets applied.
What a pick is
A pick is a guest backing one item on the menu — a plate, a cocktail, a side, whatever they would tell a friend to get. It is not a rating and there is no scale: there is no way to give an item one star, and no way to vote one down. The worst thing that can happen to an item here is that nobody picks it.
One pick per section
A guest gets one pick in each section of a menu: one drink, one app, one entrée, one side, one dessert. That is what lets the whole menu be counted rather than just the corner of it people happen to write about, and it is why a share here has a real denominator underneath it.
A section is not a heading
Those five sections are ours and they are the same everywhere. The headings on a menu are the restaurant’s own — Tacos, Fajitas, Los Vinos — and they sit inside sections. A restaurant with four entrée headings has not been given four entrée picks; all four share the one. The distinction matters twice below, once for what a percentage is a share of and once for when it is allowed to appear at all.
Yours to change until midnight
A pick can be changed or removed the same night. After that it is in. Changing a pick a fortnight later does not feel like taking one back, but that is exactly what it is, and the item picked first would lose a vote nobody meant to withdraw.
Again after 30 days
The same person can pick in the same section again after thirty days. Someone who loved the gnocchi in August and the ribeye in September has honestly picked both. It is a pace, not a limit.
Twelve months, then it drops off
A pick counts for a year. An item has to keep being picked to stay near the top, so a board reflects the kitchen as it is now rather than as it was three chefs ago.
What the percentage means
A share is always a share of picks in the group it is shown under, never a share of everyone who came in. Most guests never pick anything, so the real slice of a room is much smaller than any number here. We would rather say the narrow true thing.
Under a menu heading, the denominator is that heading. “20% of picks in Tacos” means one in five of the people who picked a taco picked that one. It does not mean one in five guests, and it does not mean one in five people who picked an entrée. Sorted by Most popular the headings come away and the items are ranked against the whole section instead, so the wording changes with them.
Twenty picks before a percentage
The threshold applies to whatever the percentage is a share OF, not to the menu as a whole. Shown under a heading, it needs twenty picks in that heading: twenty picks across Tacos before any taco carries a percentage. Shown against the section, it needs twenty picks in the section. Either way you never see a percentage whose own denominator is under twenty, because three picks out of five is not 60% of anything worth knowing. Below the line we show the count and nothing else.
Forty before anything is ranked
The Most popular sort only appears once a section has forty picks behind it. Ranking six picks is theatre.
Ties share a place
Three items on fourteen picks are all #2, and the next one is #5. Numbering them 2, 3 and 4 would read better and would be asserting an order the picks do not support.
What a restaurant can change
A restaurant runs its own menu here. It can add and remove items, fix names, prices and descriptions, name its own headings, upload photographs of what it serves, reply to a comment, and mark something 86’d when the kitchen runs out. On a menu it has embedded on its own website it also sets the colors, the type and the layout.
It cannot touch a single number, and neither can we. There is no field anywhere in the software where a pick count, a share or a rank can be typed in, raised, lowered or reordered. They are computed from picks and nothing else. This is not a promise about our conduct; it is a statement about what the product is able to do.
86 is not removal
When a restaurant marks an item 86’d, the item stays on the page with its picks and stays in its denominator. Only the pick button goes, because nobody can honestly recommend something the kitchen could not serve them. An 86 clears itself after twelve hours, so it cannot quietly become removal.
No paid placement
Nothing on a menu can be bought. No restaurant can pay to move an item up, to hide an item that is beating it, or to appear above another restaurant. There is no advertising product and no sponsored position in any ranking.
Comments
Only someone who picked an item can comment on it, which is why the comments here are about what people ordered rather than the parking or the wait. A restaurant can reply, and its reply is always labeled as the restaurant. It cannot edit or delete a comment, and neither can we on request. Undoing a pick removes the comment attached to it, because the two were one act.
Photographs
Every photograph on a menu is supplied by the restaurant. We do not accept guest photographs and we never use stock imagery, because a stock photograph of fish and chips is a lie about that restaurant’s fish and chips. Where an item has no photograph, it has none.
Photographs never appear on the surface where picking happens. An item should not win a pick because it was the one that got photographed.
Where a number can be wrong
Menus change and prices drift, and we build these pages from what a restaurant publishes, so an item can be renamed or a price can move before we catch it. Tell us and we will fix it. What we will not do is adjust a count, a share or a rank, for a restaurant or for anyone else.
Questions about any of this, including from a restaurant that thinks a number is wrong: hello@theorderinsider.com.