How we work.

Every restaurant we cover carries an Insider Score: a single number from 0 to 10, calibrated to Nashville. Higher is better. The top-ranked room in the city sets the top of the scale, so a 9.5 here means the best Nashville has, not a claim about any other city.

The score is not a copy of another site's star average and not one critic's single meal. It reads how a kitchen has performed over time and whether it still holds that standard today.

Never for sale. No restaurant can buy a score, a place on a list or a position in a ranking. Advertising on this site is labeled as advertising and has no effect on any score.

Insider Scores are calibrated per city. The highest-ranked room in Nashville sets the top of the scale at 9.9, and everything below scales to that anchor.

We do this because every city's dining scene has its own ceiling. Forcing one global scale would either flatten smaller markets into the sixes and sevens or inflate the biggest ones until every city looked the same. Per-city calibration tells the truer story: this is the best room in this town, ranked against the rooms it actually competes with. A 8.6 in Nashville is the best Nashville has. It is not a claim about any other city.

Data ages. Restaurants close, change chefs, move rooms. If you spot an error, stale hours, a closed room, a factual mistake in a guide, email the desk and we will fix it. Substantive corrections are logged in the open: the Updated date on the guide changes, and the entry is revised. We do not silently edit published work.