One number, five honest sub-scores. Built from millions of reviews and Instagram captions, weighted by recency, with low-quality reviews discarded and adjusted for reviewer history. Recomputed weekly. No restaurant pays to move it. Here's exactly how it works.
The Curateria Score is the result of three weighting principles applied across thousands of data points per restaurant. We weight reviews by recency: the last 90 days at roughly 2.4× the prior year, so a kitchen reset earns its new score quickly. We discard low-quality reviews (potential fakes, bot patterns, brigading from offsite) before any aggregation. And we adjust for reviewer history so a serial 4.9-star tipper and a serial 3.0-star skeptic don't drown each other out.
The number you see breaks down into five sub-scores (Food, Atmosphere, Value, Service, Positivity) but those aren't the inputs to the score. They're the way we show you what the synthesized signal is saying across the corpus. Read the per-signal rationales below for how each sub-score is built.
Food quality is the largest single contributor to the Curateria Score, weighted at ~38%. We measure it not by rating averages but by how often reviewers feel obliged to name a dish. When a kitchen does something specific enough that 6% of recent reviews cite the same dish, the score moves. Generic praise plateaus around 4.3. Specific praise pushes through 4.6.
We pull dish-level mentions from Google review text, Instagram captions where the venue is tagged, and Reddit threads on r/melbournefood. A model classifies each mention by sentiment intensity. “The tortelli was incredible” counts more than “food was fine.” The kitchen's top-3 dishes and their mention velocity feed the food-quality sub-score.
Atmosphere is weighted at ~22%. A great kitchen in a brutal room is still a brutal night. We score the room on consistency: does the lighting, music, and table-spacing match what reviewers expect at this price point? Mismatch costs more than ugliness: a 4-star bistro that feels like a 2-star canteen will score worse than the canteen that knows what it is.
Sources: review sentences tagged for room/vibe/lighting/noise (Google + Instagram), plus our editors' in-person visits to the top-200 venues each year. The visit notes are the truth-set the model is calibrated against.
Value is weighted at ~15% and is the single factor most likely to swing a score in either direction quickly. We measure it as a delta against the suburb-and-cuisine peer group: a $28 pasta in Carlton is judged differently than a $28 pasta in Hawthorn. Reviewers tell us when they felt fleeced; we just tally the words.
Specific value-language (“worth it,” “steep for what you get,” “BYO saves you”) gets weighted 3× the generic “reasonable”. The peer-group comparison is recomputed weekly so the score reflects the current market, not last year's prices.
Service is weighted at ~15%. We don't privilege “friendly”; we privilege appropriate. A high-volume CBD lunch counter shouldn't be ranked against a $200-a-head tasting menu on the same axis. Our model classifies the service style and benchmarks against peers in the same segment.
Negative service signals (slow, dismissive, transactional) are weighted 1.5× positive ones. We trust the complaints more than the platitudes. Volume matters: a single bad night doesn't move the score, but a pattern across 30+ days does.
Positivity is weighted at ~10%: the smallest sub-score, and deliberately so. It's a cross-cutting signal: how often do reviewers leave actively glowing, beyond the bare 5-star tap? Restaurants that turn diners into evangelists score high here even when their food/value/service sub-scores are merely good.
We weight positivity less than the others to avoid letting a viral moment dominate the score. A restaurant doesn't earn a 4.7 because Instagram is buzzing. It earns it because the first four sub-scores are all ≥4.5 and positivity is just the signal that says “the room knows what it's doing.”
Every score is recomputed weekly from the full review corpus: not a sample, not a cached summary. The recency weighting means a restaurant under new ownership earns its new score within ninety days, regardless of legacy reputation. We don't hand-tune any sub-score, and no restaurant pays (directly or indirectly) to move their number.
When a restaurant is verified by venue (claimed by the actual operator), their listing gets a chip and a few partner-only surfaces. Their score is unaffected. The chip exists so diners know who's answering the comments, not to bias the math.
Sample size matters: anything under 30 reviews is flagged as low-confidence on the listing. We'd rather show you honestly thin data than fake a confident number.
It's an aggregate signal across thousands of diners. A 4.7 means that across the corpus we read, this restaurant did the four things well that diners cared about. It does not mean you, on a Tuesday, in a bad mood, will love it. Personal taste is personal.
It's not influenced by partners. Restaurants who claim their listing get tools to respond to reviews and update their hours. They do not get a higher score, a better rank in any list, or a featured slot. The wall between the editorial product and the partner product is the whole point of the brand.
Filter by suburb, cuisine, vibe, or score. Every number you see is built the way this page describes. No exceptions.