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Can You Trust Our Reviews? Every review comes from our own visit, ends in a clear verdict with the good and the not so good, and is never changed because a business asked. The site earns commission from affiliate booking links, and that never changes a verdict.
Restaurant reviews are only worth reading if you know how they were produced. This page sets out how we work, what our verdicts mean and what we will not do.
What Rules Do We Follow?
- We write from experience: food is food and a hotel room is a hotel room. We judge what we ate, saw and slept in, and we say plainly when we have not visited a place yet.
- We book like anyone else: a kitchen that knows a reviewer is at table six is not the kitchen you will meet. Where a visit is a return visit, we say so in the review.
- No paid reviews: no restaurant or hotel has paid to appear, to rank higher or to have criticism removed. The site does earn commission from affiliate booking links, such as hotel, transfer and car hire links, and this never changes a verdict. If any piece of content is ever paid for, it will be labelled clearly at the top.
- We write from our own visits and we research: reviews are built on meals and stays we have actually experienced. We then check what other diners and guests say, from respected guides to public reviews, and compare it with our own experience. One visit never defines a venue, ours or anyone else’s, so where our view and the wider picture differ, we say so.
Why Does an Ordinary Visit Matter?
This is the part of the model we feel most strongly about, because it is where most restaurant coverage falls down. A great deal of what gets published as a review is a restaurant inviting someone in, knowing exactly who they are and why they are there. What that person experiences is not what you will experience. We go into the wider problem in why most restaurant reviews are worthless.
We book like anyone else and we say nothing. If the owner comes out to the table to talk about the food, that is genuinely impressive, precisely because he had no idea who he was talking to. If a restaurant later tells us it has improved and invites us back, we will happily look again, and the review will say what we found.
What About Complimentary Dessert and Zivania?
Cypriot restaurants routinely finish a meal with fruit, dessert or a small glass of zivania that nobody ordered. That is standard hospitality offered to every table in the room, and refusing it would be rude. It has never influenced a verdict. Our guide to Cypriot meze explains how fruit and sweets traditionally close a meal here.
What Are We Judging?
Verdicts cover the whole visit rather than a single dish, weighted roughly in this order. Food quality counts for the most, and setting for the least.
- Food quality carries the most weight. Ingredients, technique and whether the kitchen is confident enough to leave good produce alone.
- Consistency comes next, and it is why we revisit. Any restaurant can produce one good evening. Producing twenty is the hard part.
- Service means whether the evening is managed, not whether staff are friendly. Those are different things.
- Value is judged against what a place charges rather than against some absolute figure. An expensive restaurant is not marked down for being expensive. It is marked down when the bill outruns what arrived.
- Setting counts, and it cannot rescue a kitchen. Several restaurants on our list have the best rooms in Limassol and sit low on the ranking for exactly that reason.
What Do Our Verdicts Mean?
- Recommended: we would book it again without hesitation. The BEGE review is an example.
- Recommended with caveats: worth visiting for a specific reason, with a clear weakness. Usually the kitchen or the value, as in our Golden Monkey review.
- Not recommended: something significant is not working, and we would rather explain why than leave it off the list quietly.
Every verdict comes with a short list of what was good and what was not so good, so you can decide for yourself.
How Many Times Do We Visit?
Where possible, more than once. Some restaurants on this site have been visited upwards of twenty times over several years, and that is the only way to judge consistency honestly.
Where a review is based on a single visit, the review says so. One evening tells you what a kitchen can do, not what it does reliably, which is why we also read what other diners report before drawing a conclusion.
What Happens When We Are Critical?
Criticism on this site starts with what we experienced and when. We also read what others report, and where a complaint is repeated by many people we say so, clearly labelled as what other diners report rather than our own experience. We do not make claims about a business on the strength of a single anecdote, ours or anyone else’s.
Where a restaurant has an obvious problem we will say so plainly, including when the room is beautiful and the food is not.
How Do We Handle Updates and Corrections?
Restaurants change. Chefs leave, standards move in both directions, and a review written two years ago may no longer be accurate. We revisit and update rather than leaving old verdicts standing, and our ranked guide to the best restaurants in Cyprus carries the date of its last change at the top.
If you think we have something factually wrong, tell us and we will check it. Correcting a mistake is straightforward. Removing a fair criticism because a business asked is not something we do.
Who Writes These Reviews?
Reviews are written by Oliver Jacques, who has lived in Cyprus for around six years and has been connected to the island for about ten. That matters for this kind of site, because restaurants get judged against what is actually available on the island rather than against a holiday impression.
It also means we can go back. Most of the useful judgements on this site came from a second or third visit rather than a first, and some come from years of returning to the same tavern. You can read more about Oliver Jacques.
Planning Your Trip
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Hotels across Cyprus
Frequently Asked Questions
Do You Tell Restaurants You Are Coming?
We book like anyone else. A restaurant that knows it is being reviewed gives you a performance rather than an ordinary evening.
Can a Restaurant Pay to Be Included?
No. Nobody pays for a review or a ranking, and any future paid content would be labelled at the top of the page. The site earns commission from affiliate booking links, and this never changes a verdict.
Do You Only Rely on Your Own Visits?
No. Our reviews start with our own visits, and we also research what other diners and guests say and compare the two. One experience should never decide the verdict on a whole venue.
Will You Remove a Negative Review?
We will correct anything factually wrong. We will not remove an honest account of a visit.
How Do You Choose Where to Review?
We pick places we would eat at anyway. We also review somewhere that is widely recommended and worth testing against its reputation.
Do You Review Hotels the Same Way?
Yes. Rooms are booked normally rather than arranged, and the same approach to research and criticism applies.
Final Thoughts
The point of a review is that somebody went and told you honestly what happened, and then checked that against what everyone else is saying. Everything on this page exists to make that claim verifiable rather than assumed.