How we rate pizza

We show you Google, TripAdvisor and Yelp stars on every place because we have nothing to hide. They are the floor: the number everyone can already look up. But a star average built from tens of thousands of strangers is blind in ways that matter to pizza. Tourist traps game it with volume. Karen reviews drag it down over parking and napkins. Bots inflate it. So we put a second rating on top: one built from people who came for the pizza and knew what they were tasting.

The Da Michele problem

Take Da Michele in Naples. Thirty-something thousand Google reviews. A 4.4-star average. A line down via Cesare Sersale that starts before lunch and doesn’t quit until they close. By every metric a star-average algorithm can see, it’s a top-ranked pizzeria on planet Earth.

It’s also genuinely great. The dough, the tomatoes, the wood-fired theatre, all of it earns its name. It’s the pizzeria Julia Roberts ate at in Eat Pray Love, and unlike most spots that get the Hollywood treatment, Da Michele deserved the spotlight.

But it’s not the only one.

Down the road there’s a place with two hundred reviews and a handwritten chalkboard. The pizzaiolo working the oven has been at it for twenty years: first generation in a family that didn’t have pizza, or third generation in a family that’s never done anything else. He’ll tell you the dough takes seventy-two hours. He’ll tell you the tomatoes come from a guy two valleys over. He’ll tell you the cow that made the mozzarella has a name. He won’t have a film crew. He’ll have a queue of locals.

The pizzaioli are the real stars. Da Michele has one. So does the place down the road. Hollywood only learned the name of the first. Algorithms only count the line of the first. Pizza lovers learn both, and that’s why their opinions sit on top of ours.

The star-volume system isn’t wrong about Da Michele. It’s blind to everyone else. So the fix was never to knock Da Michele down a peg. The fix is to raise the rest: to make sure the two-hundred-review place down the road can be found by someone who’d love it, instead of being buried under the spot with the film crew. Everything below is how we do that.

The four things we score

When a signed-in member reviews a pizzeria, they don’t leave one blunt star rating. They score four things that actually decide whether you’d go back, each out of five:

A single review’s score is the average of those four. The number you see on a place page, the OPM rating, is what we build from all of them.

How the OPM rating works

The OPM rating lives on the same 0 to 5 scale as every public star average, so you never have to do mental math to compare them. But it isn’t a plain average. It’s a weighted blend, made to be hard to game. Three simple rules do the work:

• Community reviews count for more than any single stranger’s. A review from a pizza lover who scored all four categories carries more weight than one anonymous aggregator star, because it carries more signal.
• Sheer volume can’t bully the score. We cap how much any one source’s review count can push the rating. A pizzeria with thirty thousand Google reviews can’t steamroll a place with two hundred honest ones. That’s the Da Michele rule made real: nobody gets lowered, but volume stops drowning everyone else out.
• An unproven place stays modest, instead of faking a 5.0. One glowing review shouldn’t mint a perfect score. Until a place has earned enough real opinions, its rating sits closer to the middle of the pack, so the spots at the top are the ones that actually earned it.

The result is a number that rewards depth over noise. When a place has real community reviews, the OPM rating reflects them. When it doesn’t yet, it leans on the public stars but won’t pretend a thin handful of reviews is a verdict.

What keeps the map honest

Every place is checked before it appears. Submissions from the community don’t go live automatically. A real person looks at each one, checks it isn’t already on the map, and only then publishes it. That’s slower than letting a crawler vacuum up the world, and it’s the point.

Owners can’t edit their own rating. There is no “claim this business” button that lets a restaurant tune its own stars, bury a bad review, or pay to rank. Owner-editing is off by design. The rating belongs to the people who ate there, not to the people who own the oven.

Hand-picked, not crawled. We don’t bulk-import every dot from open map data. Every pizzeria here was either drawn from a source we trust or suggested by a pizza lover and checked before it landed. A curated map is smaller than an exhaustive one. It’s also worth opening.

None of this makes us the last word: the public stars are right there next to ours, and you’re free to trust whichever you like. We just think the people who learn the name of the pizzaiolo down the road, not only the one with the film crew, deserve a rating built for them.