Frequently Asked Questions and Contact

We list all restaurants featuring in the Michelin Guide (holding 1-3 stars, a bib gourmand or a standard listing), the AA Guide (holding 1-5 rosettes), the Hardens Top 100 restaurants list and Good Food Guide World Class or Exceptional restaurants.

We do still list UK and Ireland entries from the World's Top 50 restaurant list and the Sunday Times Top 100 restaurant list, however these guides no longer have any impact on our restaurant rankings. With hindsight we never should have listed the restaurants from the World's Top 50 list (it's very much a commercially driven list and the judging criteria and assessment are very questionable), and the Sunday Times Top 100 hasn't been updated for several years.

Since we launched at the end of 2014, we have listed all restaurants holding AA rosettes and all restaurants holding Michelin stars. In 2018 we expanding our Michelin coverage to include bib gourmand awarded restaurants and in 2019 expanded further to include all restaurants with a standard Michelin guide listing (at that time called a Michelin plate).

As The Good Food Guide is not a freely accessible online guide, we have only ever included their publicly announced top restaurants on our site. This was previously a list of the top 50 restaurants, then a list of the top 20 restaurants, and now restaurants rated World Class or Exceptional.

Prior to October 2024, we listed restaurants from the official AA site when they were added to the online guide, even if they had not yet received a rosette (often restaurants would be listed prior to a rosette being awarded). However due to continued inaccuracies with the data on the official Rated Trips site (including a large number of long since closed restaurants inexplicably being added back to the official AA site in September 2024) we now only list new restaurants from the AA guide once a rosette has been awarded. We also don't list restaurants from the AA guide that have been assesed by Visit England.

The Michelin Plate was introduced by Michelin in 2016 to denote all restaurants in the guide that didn't hold either a star or a bib gourmand. This award was quietly removed in 2021 and Michelin reverted to just listing restaurants in the guide without a specific award; at Leading Restaurants we just refer to those restaurants as 'Listed' in the Michelin guide.

Unfortunately, AA Ireland decided to end the rosette scheme at the end of February 2022 and as such, no restaurants in the Republic of Ireland now hold AA rosettes and will be awarded them in future (unless this policy changes).

Sadly yes since early 2020. Although we can appreciate the reasons for this, we feel it does slightly devalue the success of achieving and maintaining 1-2 AA rosettes in particular. Nonetheless, it's a long standing guide (having been established in 1955) which we still have a lot of respect for and we have no plans to remove any AA rosette awarded restaurants from our site.

Click here to read our comprehensive comparison of these two major UK restaurant guides.

Click here to discover the official definitions for all key Michelin guide awards (stars, bib gourmands and standard listings) as well as all key AA restaurant guide awards (5 rosettes, 4 rosettes, 3 rosettes, 2 rosettes and 1 rosette).

Principally restaurants we list as gastropubs must be recognised as a form of public house; unlike other gastropub guides, just being in a former pub building isn't generally enough to meet our criteria for this. One of the most simple definitions we can give is that customers should ideally be able to visit a genuine pub for a drink only and not food if they so wish. Any venue in a former pub building that doesn't offer customers the option of a drink without food is really a pure restaurant and can no longer be classed as a pub in our view. Having said that, we do use a variety of different sources to determine if a restaurant can be classified as a gastropub, so there may be some variations to the above from time to time.

We're always open to this, so potentially more guides could be added in future. We don't plan to include guides or restaurant lists that are purely created for the commercial gain of the operators of those lists; whilst we applaud anything that encourages more customers to visit restaurants, the judging practices for some of these newer lists don't really compare well versus those delivered by anonymous inspectors from established guides. Very often these new commercially driven lists are just a collection of random regional food writers listing their favourite restaurants (without any real objectivity) which is then collated into a fairly random list.

Our listings are primarily based on the awards given by the major food guides. If you want a restaurant to appear on our site, you can either list it directly with us or try and persuade a major UK food guide to list the restaurant.

If you have recently received your first award from a major restaurant guide we feature (congratulations!) please note that it's a manual process for us to update Leading Restaurants.co.uk and create your new restaurant listing, so it may take a little while before your restaurant is shown on our site.

Contacting us will certainly not speed up this process, so please do not do this, we will update your awards as soon as we are able to.

If you already have a restaurant listing with Leading Restaurants.co.uk, you can easily claim and upgrade your restaurant listing online at any time by following the instructions in the Is this your restaurant? section at the bottom of your restaurant listing page. Once you have claimed your restaurant listing, you can then instantly purchase a restaurant listing upgrade online which will allow you to edit all aspects of the listing (as well as add additional content like more images, a restaurant description and menu uploads).

If there is no Is this your restaurant? section visible on your restaurant listing page, this means the listing has already been claimed and upgraded by another user.

Remember, as we list award holding restaurants for free, listings by default are not owned by anyone until they are claimed and upgraded.

As stated when you make listing changes via your manage restaurant area, please note certain changes will take up to 24 hours to reflect on your live listing.

You can add your restaurant to our website via our simple online process; click here to learn more

If you have recently received an award from a major restaurant guide we feature (congratulations!) please note that it's a manual process for us to update Leading Restaurants.co.uk to reflect this, so it may take a little while before the award is shown on our site.

Contacting us will certainly not speed up this process, so please do not do this, we will update your awards as soon as we are able to.

If you have lost an award on our site and don't know why this is, please double check with the official website of the restaurant guide in question that your award is still listed there. Often guides remove awards without making the restaurant aware; this can be for a variety of legitimate reasons such as a change in head chef or concept, however it's not uncommon for "admin errors" to occur and awards be removed by mistake. Once your award is reinstated on the official website of the guide, it will reappear on our site when we next perform a manual update.

Please see below for a comparison between the different listing upgrade plans available with Leading Restaurants. You can easily claim and upgrade your restaurant listing online at any time by following the instructions in the Is this your restaurant? section at the bottom of your restaurant listing page.

Yes absolutely, you can cancel your restaurant listing upgrade at any time via our online billing portal. We will then cancel your listing upgrade at your next renewal date and your restaurant listing will revert to being a free listing.

Any restaurants which are closed and/or no longer hold awards from a major restaurant guide will not feature by default in our search results. Please note that since Leading Restaurants serves very much as a historical reference, as well as a platform for finding current award winning restaurants, we are not able to remove any direct restaurant listing pages from our site, even for restaurants which have since closed (or indeed any restaurant listing page).

All restaurants listed on this site are public businesses and as such we do not need any permission to list them. This is very much why Google, Tripadvisor and any other online service can also create listings for any restaurant.

It is not possible to edit any information on your restaurant listing (including contact info, opening times, images) on Leading Restaurants.co.uk without purchasing a listing upgrade. We generate thousands of restaurant bookings a year via our visitors and list a significant amount of information for every restaurant we include (which is checked when a restaurant is first listed) for no charge whatsoever.

Certain information obtained from Google Maps does also automatically update around once per year for restaurants that are open and still hold awards (this just covers opening times and the latest restaurant image), and of course we update any restaurant guide awards held for all listings when applicable. We do also sometimes update other information manually that we feel benefits our users, such as the status of a restaurant if we're made aware it has closed. Naturally with thousands of restaurants listed on our site, we can't continually check new information so the only way to ensure any changes are made is to upgrade your listing.

Given the number of visitors our site receives and the amount of time and investment that goes into maintaining the site, we feel a charge of £24.99 per year is exceptional value to be able to make unlimited changes to a listing at any time (that's less than 7p per day!) even during challenging times for hospitality. This fee is far less than many other (less popular) hospitality listing sites charge for inclusion.

It really would not be fair on the many restaurants who do support Leading Restaurants.co.uk by paying a yearly subscription if we allowed non-paying restaurants to make listing changes, so please understand there are no exceptions to the above.

Yes of course! Please see our link to us page for more information.

Please note that following our site relaunch in 2023, we no longer offer our free auto-updating restaurant awards widget to embed on your site.

Yes, we like to visit restaurants as well as listing them and have built up a reasonable library of reviews since our site launch in 2014; click here to view all our restaurant reviews

No, our restaurant reviews do not have any impact on the restaurant rank shown on this site.

Thank you for your consideration but no, although we receive many requests, we've never accepted an invite to eat in a restaurant for free. All our restaurant visits take place anonymously and we always pay for our meals, we personally feel this is important to give an honest review. And naturally, we would never request a free meal in exchange for a review, so if you do receive such a request purporting to be from us, please rest assured it's not genuine.

However by all means, please get in touch and let us know if you feel we'd enjoy your restaurant, we're always happy to keep a place in mind for a future visit.

We're always 100% honest with our reviews; every restaurant can have a bad day and sometimes it's just the luck of the draw if we've visited your restaurant on that particular day. We would always encourage a restaurant to make constructive use of any issues we may have experienced, as often these can be easily resolved.

If we've had a really poor experience though, you'll appreciate we're unlikely to revisit. It's not unheard of for us to revisit restaurants where we've had a poor experience (particularly if key aspects of the restaurant have changed over time, such as the ownership) but that may take several years as we do often seek out restaurants we've not previously visited first, and we don't review a huge number of restaurants yearly.

All our reviews are clearly dated so our users can decide if they're still relevant or not. And just to clarify (although we've only been asked to do this once in 10 years so not applicable to 99.99% of people reading this!) we don't remove reviews.

Yes, you can purchase our full restaurant database instantly online. For full details of what's included in our database please click here

Yes, closed restaurants are included for historical reference, but you can easily filter the CSV file once downloaded to identify these.

Yes, please see our restaurant database purchase page where there is a link to download a sample file at the bottom of the page.

No, your purchase allows you to download the database for 7 days. After this time period has expired, you can purchase the database again at any point in future to download the latest version.

There are many benefits to become a Leading Restaurants member; even creating a free account allows you to add saved locations and create a restaurant list. You can unlock additional benefits and support the site by becoming a VIP member via our quick and easy online process. For more details including a full comparison between our membership levels, please click here

Yes! Simple economics dicates that we have to run advertising to support the site (you would have to have very little understanding of the real world not to appreciate this) however for our VIP members, all adverts are removed from the site on any device you log in from. To learn more and upgrade your account, please click here

Yes absolutely, you can cancel your VIP membership at any time via our online billing portal. We will then cancel your membership at your next renewal date.

Yes, we have arrangements in place already with some but feel free to fill in the form below and send us some details.

Not at this time.

We get a lot of requests for this and the answer is 100% no.

No, no, no and no.