Editorial Policy
How this guide is made
Orlando Foodies is an independent dining guide covering Orlando and the surrounding Central Florida area, organized by city, neighborhood, cuisine, price, and setting. This page explains how businesses are chosen, where the information comes from, what a listing is and is not, and how to get something corrected.
The governing principle: useful local data, clear editorial context, no invented certainty.
Independence
Orlando Foodies is an independent dining guide. Listings are not rankings, and inclusion does not imply endorsement. Restaurants do not receive favorable editorial treatment in exchange for inclusion. No restaurant pays for coverage, placement, or a pick, there is no sponsored content on this site, and no listing can be purchased. If that policy ever changes, it will be disclosed here before it changes anywhere else.
What a listing is
Each entry is a listing with a short editorial summary — not a firsthand review. A listing contains two kinds of information, and they are treated differently. Structured facts (name, cuisine, neighborhood, city, price tier, address, hours, operating status) are sourced and dated. Editorial characterization (atmosphere, concept, style, why a place may be notable) is inference from published local coverage and public menus, and is written as description, never as a record of a visit.
How businesses are selected
The editor adds restaurants from local knowledge, reader suggestions, published Central Florida food coverage, and neighborhood walkthroughs. The bar for inclusion is that a business is real, currently operating or verifiably paused, and useful to someone deciding where to eat in this metro. There is no application, no fee, and no way to buy a place in the directory. Alphabetical order is not a recommendation, and counts of listings on a map or a neighborhood page are not quality signals.
How facts are sourced
The restaurant's own website or published menu is the preferred source for its name, address, phone number, hours, and reservations. Secondary sources — local press, public records, the restaurant's own social channels — are used when a primary source does not exist. Where a detail has not been confirmed, the listing says so instead of showing an unverified value. Every record keeps internal provenance: which source each fact came from and the date it was checked.
Whether we visit
The guide does not currently publish firsthand reviews, and nothing in a listing should be read as a record of a meal, a visit, or a tasting by the editor or anyone else. You will not find "we tried," "our favorite," or "worth the drive" here. If firsthand coverage ever begins, visits — and who paid for the meal — will be disclosed on the listing itself.
How editorial summaries are written
Summaries are written to be descriptive rather than experiential: what kind of cooking, what the room is like, what the menu is built around. Unsupported superlatives are not used — a claim like "the best in Orlando" only appears when it is attributed to a named outside source in the same sentence, and colorful detail is never invented to make a listing feel editorial. Every published listing passes an automated audit for this language, and the build fails if a violation reaches a live entry.
How ratings are handled
Orlando Foodies does not operate its own review system, so no rating shown here is an Orlando Foodies rating. A star rating or review count appears only when we can name the source it came from and the date it was checked, and both are displayed next to the number. Ratings from multiple platforms are never blended into a synthetic score. Ratings without an identified source have been removed from this site.
How hours are verified
Hours are published only after being checked against the restaurant directly, and the date of that check is shown with them. When current hours cannot be verified, the field is left blank rather than guessed at — and the guides say so. Food-truck schedules are never published as fact because they change faster than we can verify them; trucks are listed as rotating vendors with a link to follow instead.
Last-checked signals
Restaurant information decays quickly, so freshness is explicit. Where a value depends on a check — ratings, review counts, hours — the date of that check is displayed next to it ("checked June 2026"). Records also carry an internal last-verified date for the listing as a whole, which is updated whenever a material fact is confirmed or corrected. A listing with no recent check is not hidden, but its unverified fields stay unshown.
How closures are handled
Every listing carries an operating status: open, permanently closed, moved, renamed, or status unverified. A place confirmed permanently closed, moved, or renamed is removed from the active directory and moved to the archive, where its status, the reason it was archived, and the date of that decision stay on the record — rather than being deleted or left standing as a dead entry. Archived pages are kept out of search results and are no longer re-checked. A listing whose address or operating status cannot be confirmed is unpublished rather than guessed at, and republished once it can be verified again.
Geographic labels
Not every restaurant here is in the City of Orlando. Listings show both the neighborhood or district and the city or town — Winter Park, Maitland, Sanford, Longwood, Windermere, and Winter Garden are separate municipalities, and Walt Disney World and Disney Springs are districts rather than cities. Vendors with rotating locations are labeled as such instead of being given a fixed address.
How corrections are processed
If a detail here is wrong, out of date, or a restaurant has closed, report a correction. Tell us the restaurant, the field in question, and what you believe is correct — a source helps, and your contact information is optional. Corrections to factual errors are made as quickly as we can confirm the right information, and a material correction updates the listing's last-verified date.
How often records are reviewed
Listings are re-checked on a rolling basis, with the most time-sensitive fields — operating status and hours — prioritized. Reader correction reports are the fastest trigger for a re-check, followed by scheduled passes over each district. There is no fixed expiry on a listing; there is a standing rule that unverified fields are withheld rather than shown.
Use of AI
AI tools assist with drafting, formatting, and data cleanup. A human editor is responsible for every published claim, and AI output is not published without review.