About Food Guide NZ
Food Guide NZ is a curated directory of the best places to eat and drink across New Zealand — covering Wellington, Auckland, Queenstown, and Christchurch.
Every listing includes opening hours, contact details, cuisine tags, menu highlights where available, and a combined rating score drawn from thousands of real reviews. We only list venues that are genuinely worth visiting — no padding, no pay-to-feature.
How our ratings work
Each place on Food Guide NZ has a combined rating — a single score that rolls together signals from multiple review platforms including Google Maps and TripAdvisor. Rather than trusting any one source (which can be gamed or skewed), we weight scores by review volume: a place with 2,000 Google reviews carries more statistical weight than one with 40. The result is a more reliable picture of how a place actually performs.
Scores are shown to one decimal place (e.g. 4.6) and colour-coded so you can compare at a glance — green for excellent, amber for decent, grey when there isn't enough data to say either way.
What makes a Staff Pick
Staff Picks are places I've personally eaten at and am happy to endorse by name. The quote alongside each Staff Pick is a genuine first-hand recommendation written after visiting — not marketing copy, not AI-generated, and not based on a freebie. I pay my own way and write what I actually think.
A Staff Pick means I'd send a friend there without hesitation. The rating alongside the quote reflects my personal experience on the day I visited, which may differ from the aggregated score if the place has changed.
What we include — and what we don't
The guide covers restaurants, cafes, bakeries, bars, food courts, and takeaway spots across four New Zealand cities. We focus on places that are currently open and trading — we remove permanently closed venues as we find them.
Not every place on the site has a full description or menu details. For some venues, the publicly available information is thin, and we'd rather show nothing than fill the page with guesses. Those pages are not promoted in search results. Only listings with a real description, menu highlights, or a personal Staff Pick note are surfaced to search engines — because those are the pages that are genuinely useful to a visitor.
Data sources
Place details — addresses, phone numbers, opening hours, photos — are sourced from public listings on Google Maps and TripAdvisor and updated periodically. Where a restaurant publishes its own menu online, we extract and display menu highlights. All third-party data is credited and linked back to the original source on each place page.
We do not scrape reviews and republish them wholesale. Review snippets shown on some pages are brief excerpts displayed to illustrate what diners say about a place, alongside attribution links.
Who we are
Food Guide NZ is built and maintained by Chris Ward, a developer and food enthusiast based in Wellington, New Zealand. I built this guide because I wanted a local food resource that was honest about its sources, transparent about how scores are calculated, and actually tells you what to order — not just a rehash of what's already on Google Maps.
Got a suggestion, spotted an error, or want to claim your listing? Get in touch.