Ratings from people who actually ate there

Most review sites will tell you a place has 4.2 stars from 1,800 people. Almost none of them will tell you what the food looked like.

Mosey is built the other way round. A rating comes from somebody who was there, and it carries their photographs of what they ate — at the table, on the day, under whatever lighting the room had.

How it works

1. You go somewhere. The bit that is not optional.

2. You rate it. A score, and a photograph or two. That is a complete rating. Plenty of people add a line about one dish, and it is usually the most useful sentence on the page.

3. It helps the next person. Your photographs are what somebody sees when they are deciding between you-were-there and somewhere they have never heard of.

Why photographs of the food

Because the question people actually have is "what would I eat", and no score answers it.

A page with nine photographs of nine different plates tells you what the kitchen is like, what the portions are like, and whether the thing you fancy is any good there. A page with a five-star average and a picture of the front door tells you somebody once walked past.

What makes a rating useful

Not length. The most useful ratings on Mosey are frequently three words and a photograph.

What helps somebody deciding: what you ate, because that is the question they have; a photograph of it, because portion size and what a thing actually looks like are impossible to describe; and one specific thing, good or bad. "Lovely" helps nobody. "The bread is the reason to come" sends somebody in with a plan.

What helps less: an account of the service, the temperature of the room, or how long the bill took. Those are real and they are about one evening. The food is the thing that will still be true next week.

Mosey Gold

Some places carry a Gold mark. It is earned rather than bought — worked out from ratings over time, so it means consistently good rather than briefly popular.

Nobody can pay for it, ask for it, or have it removed. If a place stops being good it stops being Gold, which is the only thing that makes the mark worth anything.

Places can reply, not delete

A place can answer a rating. It cannot remove one.

That is deliberate in both directions. Ratings you cannot trust are worth nothing to you, and a place that could delete its worst nights would have a page that describes a business nobody has eaten at. What a place can do is reply — and a calm, specific reply to a complaint often tells you more about somewhere than the complaint did.

What a score is worth

A place with four ratings and a place with four hundred can show the same number, and they are not the same claim.

Mosey shows how many people rated somewhere as well as what they said, because the count is half the information. Four enthusiastic ratings might be four friends; four hundred is a pattern. Neither is a reason to ignore a place — somewhere new with three ratings and three good photographs is often the best thing you will eat that month — but they are different kinds of evidence, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at.

The photographs help here too. Ten plates from ten separate visits are a much harder thing to stage than ten scores.

Your ratings are yours

They sit on your profile, they build up into a record of where you have actually been, and they are what the app uses to work out what to show you. Somebody who rates bakeries highly and late-night places badly gets a different Mosey from somebody who does the reverse.

What else to look at

• Dishes — the individual plates, rated on their own
• Lists — the places you want to remember, in one place
• Rewards — what you get for going back
• Food guides — where to eat, written up properly