nowfound

Life & fun · December 16, 2025

A food guide that ignores Google and Yelp ratings

My partner and I (ex-Googlers) plan our trips around food as a way to connect with local culture. Before every trip, we'd spend hours digging through Reddit threads and local blogs, filtering out sponsored noise to find places worth eating. So we built CuriousSpoon, a food guide we could actually trust. *Why ratings fail* - 51% of negative reviews cite service, only 31% cite food [1] - Google removed 170M fake reviews in 2023; Harvard found 16% are suspicious [2] *What we built instead* An engine that does what a local food nerd does: reads city newspapers, local critics, subreddits, chef…

A food guide that ignores Google and Yelp ratings launched on December 16, 2025 with 7 votes, #1,248 of 11,628 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.

Visit curiousspoon.app ↗Alternativestop 11% of December 2025

What it does

See your Google Maps saves and Curious Spoon’s independent restaurant picks together, with exactly what to order at each. Zero paid placements.

Your Google Maps saves and our independent food picks, together on one map, with what to order at each. A restaurant name is only half an answer. Curious Spoon connects the place, the dish, and the reason it is worth your time. Bring your Google Maps saves into the same view as our independent picks. Every place comes with the dish or drink to order, plus the context that makes it matter. Restaurants cannot pay for placement. We research and edit everyfrom curiousspoon.app

In the maker’s words, at launch

My partner and I (ex-Googlers) plan our trips around food as a way to connect with local culture. Before every trip, we'd spend hours digging through Reddit threads and local blogs, filtering out sponsored noise to find places worth eating. So we built CuriousSpoon, a food guide we could actually trust. *Why ratings…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • I built a self hosted recommendation feed to escape Google's algorithm2022 · github.com · ▲214

    I created this chrome extension for myself where I track my own behavior locally and recommend myself content from platforms I want content from (youtube/twitter/quora/etc) in a feed. I made it public just in case anyone else was interested. I would rather have control over my own algorithm and own the data. Also, it gives me flexibility. Turns out I do like these feeds just not when I don't own it haha. Let me know what you think of my implementation?

  • Snack Overflow - The OG San Francisco Treat2016 · soundcloud.com · ▲67

    Street food, existential questions on the nature of snacks

  • Tasty 3602016 · ▲72

    A community for food lovers

  • IW
    I want to find the best of everything (my weekend project)2011 · krowd.me · ▲6

    Hey HN! I built this over the weekend. It is basically an extremely rudimentary crowd sourced recommendation system for anything in any city. I know that I could easily look this information up on Yelp but I thought it might be nicer to simply look up something like "the best steak in new york" and get that information. The database is almost empty but if you look up the "best coffee in ann arbor" you'll get a result which I seeded. Go ahead and contribute what you can. Ill be adding CAPTCHAs soon to prevent spammers. Here is the link: http://www.krowd.me

  • IM
    I made a web app that tells you if your food is spicy2023 · dieornot.com · ▲9

    Hi HN ! I made a web app to check if an item on the menu is potentially spicy ? Problem: I recently arrived in Korea, and I quickly realized that if my girlfriend is not with me, I don't know what would try to kill my tastebuds. I could ask, but I'm shy and my broken korean wouldn't help much. And trying to find an answer online is time consuming, navigating between 10 paragraphs blogs. Solution: So i made this simple gpt wrapper that takes in a dish name in any language, and gives you a clear answer right away. Keep in mind that this is my first app and an mvp, to validate the idea. But I'm…

  • I collected 3M reviews for a hotel and restaurant benchmark2024 · feedcheck.co · ▲6

    I created a rating benchmark for restaurants and hotels in each state of the US scanning over 3 million reviews from Google. You can see 2 geo charts with the states with the best food and the best accommodation

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, December 2025

the whole month →
  • GP
    Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now▲3,346

    Life & fun · Dec 2025 · dosaygo-studio.github.io

  • Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files▲1,557

    Hi everyone! My name's Luke and I made the original Jmail here alongside Riley Walz. We had a ton of friends collaborate on building out more of the app suite last night in lieue of DOJ's "Epstein files" release. Please AMA!

    Life & fun · Dec 2025 · jmail.world

  • Loki.Build▲743

    Design and ship studio-grade landing pages with AI

    AI · Dec 2025 · loki.build

  • PlanEat AI▲733

    AI turns your health goals into a 7-day menu & grocery list

    AI · Dec 2025 · planeatai.com

  • 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite▲730

    Community, All the HN belong to you. This is an archive of hacker news that fits in your browser. When I made HN Made of Primes I realized I could probably do this offline sqlite/wasm thing with the whole GBs of archive. The whole dataset. So I tried it, and this is it. Have Hacker News on your device. Go to this repo (https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook): you can download it. Big Query -> ETL -> npx serve docs - that's it. 20 years of HN arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die. Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's…

    Dev tools · Dec 2025 · hackerbook.dosaygo.com

  • CyberCut AI▲723

    AI video studio for viral social clips

    AI · Dec 2025 · cybercut.ai