How this site works
Most restaurant lists are one person's opinion, one platform's algorithm, or one advertiser's budget. This one is an argument between two crowds, refereed by arithmetic we publish in full.
What this site actually does
Every restaurant here is scored twice. Once by locals — the Naver visitor score that Korean diners actually use, blended with the KakaoMap star rating. Once by tourists — the Google rating, which is where visitors to Korea leave reviews. The signed difference between them is the Gap Score.
That is the whole idea. A positive gap means visitors rate a place higher than residents do. A negative gap means the reverse. Neither is a verdict on the cooking; both are a fact about who is happy, and that turns out to be the single most useful thing you can know before joining a queue in Myeongdong.
We track 352 restaurants across 10 districts. 225 of them clear the 100-reviews-on-both-sides bar and carry a badge; those 225 have a page of their own. The remaining 127 appear in the district tables labelled thin data and are not badged, ranked or written about, because the evidence isn't there yet.
Who is behind it
seoulrestaurants.com is part of the Uncompromised Travel network — a small group of independently built travel sites, run by the same hands. There is no newsroom here and we do not pretend otherwise: one person writes the code, runs the harvest and answers the email. That email is [email protected], and it is answered by a human.
What we will never do
- Sell placement. No restaurant can pay to appear, to move up, or to lose a badge. There is no mechanism for it, because the ordering is computed before any link exists.
- Hide the formula. The weights, the thresholds, the 400 m match-rejection rule and the qualification bar are all on the methodology page, and the dataset is open so you can recompute everything yourself.
- Republish someone else's ratings as our own. The scores on this site belong to Google, Naver and KakaoMap. They appear in our prose and in our dataset with attribution, and they never appear in our structured data as an aggregate rating we collected.
- Invent a number. If a platform doesn't publish a price, we show no price. If a restaurant is below the review threshold, it gets no badge.
How the site pays for itself
Affiliate links — food tours and cooking classes on Klook and GetYourGuide, hotels
through Booking.com, a Korea eSIM, an airport transfer. If you book through one we may
earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Those links are marked
sponsored and they are concentrated on the
planning pages, where a booking decision is actually being made,
rather than sprinkled across the data tables. They cannot affect a score, a badge or an
ordering. The full disclosure is here.
Freshness & corrections
The current dataset was verified in full on the August 2026 run, and every record carries its own check date. Ratings move daily and Korean menu prices lag the platforms by a few weeks; treat the numbers as a snapshot with a date on it, which is why the date is on every one of them.
If we have got something wrong — a mismatched branch, a closed restaurant, a badge you think the data doesn't support — the corrections page explains how to say so and what we do about it.