About
What is TARE?
TARE is a simple trust-based restaurant review platform. You can initially think of it as Letterboxd for restaurants, but with a little twist!
Note: We currently only provide restaurant/food data for Toronto based restaurants!
TARE is a site where:
- You can compile a list of restaurant ratings (eg: "recommend", "not recommend") and share it with others.
- You can directly follow people you "trust" with food recommendations. You'll then be able to see what they have to say about restaurants they've been to.
- The people you trust likely trust people you don't know. We'll show you reviews from these people too, while also letting you know the exact chain of people that allowed us to show you this review. This is the main discovery mechanism for TARE; we call it having "indirect trust".
- We won't show you any reviews from people you don't have a strong connection to. TARE isn't afraid to show you nothing!
Here's a guide for how we'll present various types of reviews. It's based on how "close" a particular person is to you, as well as the actual sentiment of the review:
| Relationship Type | Recommend | "Meh" | Don't recommend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yourself | 
| 
| 
|
| Directly trusted | 
| 
| 
|
| Indirectly trusted | 
| 
| 
|
| Other (not trusted) | 
| 
| 
|
Raison d'être
What is good food? Ask a 100 people and you'd get a 100 different answers, right?
So in our opinion, it's a bit weird that existing restaurant review platforms condense all public opinion for a place into a single rating (usually a number out of 5 stars). We believe this system erases a lot nuance and personal tastes from restaurant reviews. It's a sort of aggregated lowest common denominator opinion for a place.
We're also increasingly living in a time where discerning what is "real" on the internet is getting harder and harder. In the case of restaurant reviews, trying to figure out what reviews are fake/have been paid for is near impossible.
TARE is our attempt to address both these issues. We hope that the trust system allows you to uncover more nuanced takes on food, while also providing natural guard against fake reviews.
And yes, TARE asks more from you. It's probably not as convenient as how other review sites do it, but we humbly suggest you think about what the price of said convenience is. There is so much food diversity in Toronto, don't let a bunch of randos or ad companies (Google) waste that for you!
Getting started
If it so behooves you, you can get started by creating an account.
We offer a restaurant and user search capability on the top bar. Find restaurants you like/dislike and record that! Find people you trust and follow them!
Whatever you do... just remember to have fun! :)
And maybe also say hi on Discord!