r/restaurants: rules, karma requirements and posting culture

Who posts here

Half the room is diners with no trade knowledge asking why service was slow or complaining about a meal. The other half is cooks, owners and former distributor reps who talk food cost and suppliers without explaining them. Basic questions are fine. A diner who asks a question about how the industry works and then argues with the answers gets told so.

• Diners with a complaint, a bad experience or a question about tipping, prices and service.
• Line cooks, servers and managers asking about hours, bosses and jobs.
• Independent owners and would-be owners asking about equipment, vendors and catering deals.
• Founders and freelancers pitching menus, ordering apps, websites and review services to owners.
• Travellers and locals asking where to eat, or sharing a place they liked.

Karma and account requirements

What it takes to get a post through in r/restaurants.

What you can post

What happens to a new post

Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.

• Stayed up79%
• Removed by Reddit's filters15%
• Removed by moderators5%
• Deleted by the author<1%

Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.

The culture

r/restaurants is old, created in 2008, and small, with about 11,000 members and four or five posts a day. Its title asks where you should be eating, but it is no longer a recommendations board. It is a catch-all: diners complaining, workers venting, owners asking practical questions, local news links, and people selling things to restaurants.

Most posts get little or nothing. The median is two comments and the top posts in the sample have scores around ten. What breaks through is a diner grievance that people can argue about. One such post drew more than 270 comments, and a simple question about red flags when eating out drew close to 100.

The live argument in the comments is between diners and trade people over what you are paying for. A thread about a pricey cafe taking supermarket deliveries turned into a long exchange about distributors, with industry commenters explaining that the same supplier sells every grade of product. Comments are short, around 14 words, and almost never include links.

What lands

• A diner complaint with a clear point of dispute, such as fees, tipping, table time or slow service. These pull the most comments by far.
• A one-line open question anyone can answer, like the biggest warning sign when you sit down to eat.
• An opinion about a trend, such as menus without prices or small portions on big plates.
• A practical problem from someone who runs or works in a restaurant, told as a story, like a sidewalk sign that blew into a parked car.
• Questions that invite trade people to explain how the business works.

What gets removed or ignored

• Direct solicitations: offers to build a website, set up online ordering or grow a business, sent as a post.
• Founder posts for restaurant software, including the "I built a tool, looking for feedback" kind and the "has anyone heard of" kind.
• Leading questions aimed at owners about marketing, profit leaks or reprinting menus. They read as lead generation and several were pulled.
• Bare link posts about a single local restaurant with no text.
• Personal appeals for work.

The unwritten rules

• Moderation is uneven. Some blatant ads stay up while similar ones are removed, so a pitch surviving tells you little about whether it is welcome. The ones that stay up get no replies.
• Say where you are. Posts come from the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and the Philippines, and nobody can help with a local question that has no location.
• If you ask the trade a question, take the answer. Arguing with every reply gets called out.
• Use the title tag. Few people do, and the submit page says untagged posts may be removed.
• Write the post in the body. Link and image posts with an empty body mostly sit at one point and no comments.

Self-promotion

There is no written rule on self-promotion, because there are no published rules at all. In practice moderators do remove it: about 5% of posts in the sample were taken down by mods, and most of those were pitches to restaurant owners for websites, loyalty tools, menu software or marketing help, including ones dressed up as discussion questions. Some ads slip through, but they sit at one point with no comments, so there is nothing to gain. The posts from builders that stay up and get answers ask a specific question a restaurant person can answer from experience.

How people write here

Typical post length

58 words

Typical title length

7 words

Titles phrased as a question

31%

Typical comment length

14 words

Comments that include a link

0%

Posts that carry a flair

24%

The regulars

The accounts that showed up most in our sample. Worth reading before you post: they set the tone, and they are usually the first to reply.

Top keywords

The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/restaurants.

• restaurant 157 posts
• restaurants 79 posts
• food 79 posts
• menu 46 posts
• ordering 27 posts
• restaurant owners 14 posts
• order 41 posts
• waiter 9 posts
• table 25 posts
• dining 20 posts
• chef 11 posts
• restaurant's 8 posts
• dinner 19 posts
• dishes 13 posts
• caf 10 posts
• menus 11 posts
• eat 25 posts
• reservations 9 posts
• owners 23 posts
• reservation 8 posts
• staff 18 posts
• meal 18 posts
• cafe 10 posts
• dine 7 posts
• restaurant menu 5 posts
• appetizers 5 posts
• orders 18 posts
• places 18 posts
• qr code 10 posts
• steak 8 posts
• dish 10 posts
• customers 25 posts
• ordered 12 posts
• prices 16 posts
• kitchen 15 posts
• place 28 posts
• restaurantes 4 posts
• qr menu 4 posts
• paper canoe 4 posts
• customer 25 posts

Recurring topics: restaurant, restaurants, food, menu, owners, app, review, bar, customer, dining.

Growth

1. 201279
2. 2013130
3. 2014159
4. 2015202
5. 2016251
6. 2017698
7. 2018941
8. 20191.3k
9. 20201.6k
10. 20213.8k
11. 20234.8k
12. 20245.7k
13. 20257.9k
14. 202611k

Related subreddits

• r/restaurant
• r/restaurantowners
• r/restaurateur
• r/foodies_sydney
• r/FoodService
• r/denverfood
• r/FoodSanDiego
• r/Cooking
• r/finedining
• r/askportland

Common questions