Review Policy & Community Standards

• Every submitted review is checked by our team before it is published. Nothing is published automatically.
• Submitting a review does not guarantee that it will be published.
• A restaurant does not need to be a member, or to be listed or claimed on London Food Hubs, for a customer to submit a review of it.
• For a restaurant that is not yet listed, we ask the reviewer to upload proof that they visited or bought from it (for example a receipt or order confirmation), and we look at the restaurant details they give us before anything is published.
• Restaurants cannot pay to have a review approved or removed. We do not sell review approval, removal or ranking.

To help us check reviews, we ask each reviewer for a mobile telephone number, the date of their visit, an approximate one-hour time window for the visit, and their consent to be contacted about the review. For a restaurant that is not yet listed we also ask for proof of visit or purchase.

• We may telephone the reviewer to verify their visit or review before it is published.
• The mobile number, the consent record, the visit time window, any uploaded proof, the outcome of any telephone check and our internal notes are kept private. They are never shown publicly and are not shown to the restaurant being reviewed. Proof of visit is viewable only by our administrators.
• Reviewers should hide anything they don't need to show, and must never upload a picture showing a full payment card number.
• How long we keep this information is covered in our Privacy Policy.

• Approved means the review passed London Food Hubs' moderation process. It does not mean London Food Hubs endorses the reviewer's opinion or guarantees that every statement in it is accurate.
• A verification badge describes one specific step we completed, and nothing more: Visit evidence verified means an administrator reviewed the reviewer's proof of visit and recorded it as verified; Telephone verification completed means we spoke to the reviewer and recorded the check as successful. Uploading evidence, or being approved, does not by itself produce a badge.
• A review without a badge has not necessarily been found to be false — it may simply not have needed or completed that step.

• Only approved reviews count. Pending, rejected and removed reviews never affect any score.
• Reviewers rate six things from 1 to 5: Food Quality, Service, Hospitality, Cleanliness, Value for Money and Overall Experience.
• A restaurant's overall review score is the average of each approved review's Overall Experience rating (or, for older reviews that only ever had one rating, that single rating), shown to one decimal place.
• Category averages are calculated only from reviews that rated each category. Older single-rating reviews have no category ratings and are never given any.

• The verified owner of a restaurant on London Food Hubs may post one public response to each approved review of their restaurant, and may edit it. Responses are shown exactly as written and are not reviewed before they appear; we may remove a response that breaks this policy.
• A restaurant owner may report or challenge an approved review, choosing a reason and adding a short explanation. Reports are private and are looked at by our team.
• Reporting a review does not remove it. A review stays published unless our team decides it breaks this policy.
• Restaurants cannot delete, edit, hide or change the rating of a customer's review, and a review is not removed simply because it is negative.

Any signed-in user may report an approved review they believe breaks this policy. We keep reports private, and each person can report a given review once. We decide each case on its merits.

• Fake reviews, including reviews by people who did not genuinely visit or buy from the restaurant.
• Restaurant owners, staff or their associates posing as customers, whether about their own or a competitor's business.
• Undisclosed conflicts of interest.
• Misleading incentivised reviews — reviews given in exchange for payment, discounts or other rewards without that being made clear.
• Abusive or discriminatory content.
• Content that is irrelevant to the restaurant, or that exposes other people's private information.
• Unlawful content, including allegations that are defamatory.

Reviews that break these rules may be rejected before publication or removed after it. When we remove a published review we take it out of public view and out of the ratings; we keep an internal record of the decision.

Our checks are proportionate to a small platform. They reduce, but cannot eliminate, the chance that a review is inaccurate or unfair, and they do not remove the responsibility of reviewers for what they write. If you believe a published review is unlawful, please report it using the report link on the review, or contact us using the details in our Privacy Policy.

This policy is currently published in English only, which is its authoritative version. The short summary shown on restaurant pages is available in English, Bengali, Arabic and French. Customer reviews and restaurant responses are shown in the language they were written in and are not automatically translated.