About Guide2
Guide2 is published by Blue Ridge Consulting Group. Guides are drafted from our own place records and from facts read at the venue’s own site, then checked against those sources before publication.
What this is
Guide2 covers 17 small and mid-sized American cities: 5,589 places to eat, drink and go, 650 guides, and 844 events currently listed. It exists because the useful answer to “where should I eat here” is usually a short, specific list rather than a directory of everything.
Where the data comes from
Place records — names, addresses, categories, ratings and review counts — come from Google Places and are re-synced on a schedule. Ratings reflect the last sync rather than a live value. Hours and prices, where a guide states them, are read from the venue’s own website at the time the guide is written.
How places are ranked
Never by raw star rating. A place is scored against its city’s average and weighted by how many reviews sit behind it, so a 5.0 from two reviews does not outrank a 4.6 from nine hundred. Where a guide leans on thin evidence it says so.
What we check before publishing
590 of the 650 published guides have been rewritten and checked against their sources. A guide cannot publish if it names a price, an address or a review count that does not appear in the material it was written from, if it recommends a national chain, a permanently closed business, or a place outside the city it claims to cover.
What we do not claim
Nobody on this site has visited every place in it. Guides are written from records and from what venues publish about themselves, not from personal visits, and we do not pretend otherwise. Opening hours change. Confirm before you travel.