You're sitting at your laptop with the cursor blinking in a Google review box, and your brain has gone blank. Or worse: you've got plenty to say, and every version sounds either sycophantic or unhinged. I've been there. I once published a review of a Sardinian trattoria where I spent four paragraphs complaining about a wobbly chair and one line on the actual food. It got flagged as unhelpful. Rightly so.
The gap I see in almost every guide on how to write a good review for a restaurant is that they all start after the meal. They tell you about tone, structure, describing taste without vague words. Nobody tells you what to ask yourself before you type a single letter. That's the step that separates a review people actually trust from one that reads like a grudge note.
So here's the checklist I use now. It's the list of questions to ask before writing a restaurant review, and it starts well before your fork hits the plate.
Key Takeaways
- Establish your reading goal before you write: are you warning locals, rewarding staff, or documenting a specific dish?
- Separate the food from the service from the price. They fail and succeed independently, and readers need them separated.
- Interrogate your own mood, your hunger, and your expectations, because a starving diner at 9pm is a terrible witness.
- Note the factual context while you're still at the table: prices, portion sizes, wait times, what was actually ordered.
- Wait until the next day to publish. It costs nothing and it filters out 80% of the fury.
The questions to ask before writing a restaurant review nobody talks about
Most reviewers start writing the moment they get home. The food is still on their tongue, the wine is still doing its thing. That's exactly why the first draft is unreliable.
Who is actually going to read this, and what do they need?
There are, roughly speaking, four kinds of restaurant review readers. Tourists deciding on a single meal in a city they've never visited. Locals weighing up a Tuesday dinner. People with dietary restrictions scanning for a safe option. And, quietly, the restaurant's own staff checking whether their night went okay.
Each one needs a different review. A tourist cares about atmosphere, portion size, and whether the price matches the neighbourhood. A local cares about consistency, whether they can get a table on a Saturday, and if the menu has changed since last season. Someone with a dairy allergy needs one specific sentence that says "I asked and they confirmed X."
I'll admit that I used to write every review for an imaginary council of anonymous critics. Now I ask myself: who is the one person I'd hand this to?
Was I actually a reliable witness tonight?
Here's the question nobody asks and everybody needs. Was the restaurant bad, or was I bad? Had a brutal day at work? Booked for a table of six and got shoved near the door? Showed up fifteen minutes late and got the frosty treatment?
Three years ago I wrote a scorching review of a bistro in Lyon. Great technique, terrible verdict. I reread it eighteen months later and realised I'd had a migraine and barely touched the food. I deleted the review on the spot. An honest reviewer interrogates their own state before reaching for adjectives.
How much do I actually know about what I'm eating?
If you can't name the cuisine beyond "Italian-ish," or you didn't read what the chef does, or you don't know if the place opened last month or in 1998, you're reviewing blind.
Ask yourself:
- What was I promised by the menu, and what arrived?
- Did I ask the server where the fish came from or how the dish was prepared? If not, am I guessing?
- Was this the signature dish or something I improvised?
- Did I check the price before ordering or after the bill? (Different reviews come out of those.)
The other question that gets skipped: did I ask about allergens, substitutions, or the actual cooking method? Not because you're obliged to review with a food expert's vocabulary, but because a review that says "I asked whether the sauce contained cream and they couldn't tell me" is worth ten reviews that say the food was "creative."
What is the 30/30/30 rule for restaurants?
The 30/30/30 rule splits a restaurant's success into three roughly equal parts: food, service, and atmosphere (some versions swap atmosphere for price-value). The idea is that a place can rarely win on one pillar alone and survive. A brilliant kitchen with cold service still folds. A spectacular room with mediocre food empties out within a season.
I don't treat it as gospel. Plenty of places break it deliberately: the neighbourhood bistro with plastic chairs that's been packed for forty years is not three-way dominant, it's just impossibly good on one axis and forgiven on the others. But as a reviewing framework, it's genuinely useful. When you sit down to write, ask yourself which of the three carried the evening, and which one dragged. Name the weak pillar directly. Readers respect reviewers who can separate the meal from the mood from the bill.
What are some good questions to ask a restaurant feedback survey?
If you run a restaurant rather than review one, the equivalent question set is the feedback survey. And the biggest mistake is the same as in reviewing: asking vague questions and expecting precise answers.
Questions that actually produce usable data:
- Which dish did you order, and would you order it again?
- Did any part of your visit feel longer than it should have?
- Was there anything you were told about a dish that turned out not to be true?
- What nearly stopped you from coming back? (Leave it open-ended, no multiple choice.)
- If you're a regular, what changed since your last visit?
"Were you satisfied?" is a useless question. It gets you a four-star average and zero insight. Ask for a specific recall, and people will actually tell you something.
What are some good comments to write in a restaurant review?
Forget generic praise. Specificity is the whole game. Here's a small comparison of what weak versus strong comments look like:
| Weak comment | Strong comment |
|---|---|
| "Great food, friendly service!" | "The saffron risotto arrived under-seasoned but the texture was spot-on; I'd ask for extra parmesan next time." |
| "Would recommend." | "Portions are generous but the mains run €4-6 higher than comparable spots within three streets." |
| "Lovely atmosphere." | "We waited 25 minutes for the appetizers on a Thursday evening at roughly a third occupancy — the kitchen seemed understaffed." |
| "Best pizza ever." | "The base was baked through, the char was even, and it arrived in 12 minutes flat." |
| "Service was bad." | "Our server never checked back after the mains arrived; we had to flag someone down for the bill." |
The pattern is the same every time: say what you observed, not how you felt about it. Feelings go in the star rating. Observations go in the text.
How to write a good review about a restaurant
Structure comes last. Once you've answered the pre-writing questions honestly, the review writes itself in four short beats:
- What you ordered and why (one sentence).
- The strongest specific thing that happened, good or bad (one to three sentences).
- The weakest thing, named plainly without exaggeration.
- Who you'd recommend it to, and whether you'd go back.
That's it. Anything longer and you're repeating yourself.
The one question to ask before you hit publish
Would the chef or the server recognise the evening I just described? Not agree with the star rating, but recognise the evening. If the answer is yes, publish. If not, delete and try tomorrow, when your memory will have sorted the food from the mood from the wine.
I made peace with this after that Lyon incident. The reviews I'm proudest of are the boring ones. The ones where I listed exactly what I ate and exactly what I paid. The ones that, three years later, I can reread without wincing.
