About
Harry.

Ten is the number that lets you actually pick somewhere. Anything more and you stop choosing dinner and start managing a research project. Anything less and you haven’t really chosen — you’ve been handed a small, slightly suspicious menu.

“Ten is enough to argue about. Forty-seven is enough to stop bothering.

Tripadvisor will, if asked, return forty-seven Italians in your postcode. The cruel joke is that nobody — not a soul — scrolls to page two. You will read the first five, panic, scroll back to the first one, and book it anyway. We’ve all done it. We’ve all been disappointed by a pasta we picked because it had a slightly better photograph than the next pasta down. Choice paralysis is not a food problem. It’s a list-design problem.

Ten is also enough to argue with. You can scan ten and disagree with three of them. You can show ten to a friend and say absolutely not the Greek one, and a real conversation happens. Forty-seven is just a wall. You bounce off a wall.

† Yes, we have tested eight and twelve. Eight feels stingy. Twelve feels like homework. Ten is the goldilocks integer. We will die on this hill, ideally over a long lunch.

A brief, affectionate roast of the three institutions that brought us here. They are useful. They are also noisy in very particular ways, and Harry’s job is essentially to filter their three different flavours of nonsense into one usable signal.

Google

Everyone on Google gives 4.3 stars. The toastie place gives 4.3. The Michelin three-star gives 4.3. A petrol station that briefly stocked a slightly-above-average sandwich gives 4.3. This is because nobody, on Google, wants to be the tosser who one-starred a small business run by someone’s aunt. It’s a kindness. It’s also completely uninformative. Google’s star average tells you a place exists and has not, recently, set fire to anyone. That is the ceiling of what it tells you.

Yelp

Yelp is beloved by Yelp Elite, a population composed almost entirely of people who once had a four-star birthday dinner and have been conducting a quiet vendetta against hospitality ever since. The platform’s house style is a very specific kind of brittle disappointment, delivered at length, often in the second person. Useful? Sporadically. Worth reading at scale? Christ, no. The most interesting thing about Yelp is the gap between what Yelp says and what Google says — that delta is, all by itself, a signal. Harry treats it as one.

Tripadvisor

Tripadvisor is what happens when you let people who flew somewhere specifically to be disappointed by a pasta write the reviews. The training set is tourists rating tourist spots in cities they don’t live in, in a state of mild dehydration, on the third night of a four-night trip. The top result is almost always a place with a man outside holding a menu. Locals would rather walk into the sea. This is not Tripadvisor’s fault, exactly — but it is its shape, and you should know the shape of a thing before you let it choose your dinner.

So Harry reads all three. And the critics. And then, crucially, notices when they disagree — because that’s usually where the interesting truth is hiding.

† This is not a hit piece. Each of these platforms is genuinely useful in narrow bands. They’re a great way to find out the phone number. They’re a less great way to find out whether to go.

Harry is, technically, a bigfoot. Eight feet of opinion in a half-moon pair of spectacles. He came down from the woods sometime in the late eighties, having read a great deal and resolved, on balance, that humans cannot be trusted to choose their own dinner. He has been keeping notebooks ever since. He has, in his time, eaten three things on a single plate that he is still annoyed about.

He is also, of course, a fiction — a nod, if you must know, to Harry and the Hendersons. The actual Harry is a small syndicate of obsessives: chefs, ex-critics, a former sommelier with a grudge, two software engineers who like to argue about cacio e pepe, and one statistician we are not allowed to name for tax reasons. The notebooks exist; the fur is questionable. What we put on the website is the bit of all of them that has opinions and isn’t afraid of them.

“Definitely not a language model. Almost certainly not a small committee. Probably just a large hairy man who reads too much.

When in doubt, picture the footprint. The footprint is, in the deepest sense, the brand.

Every restaurant Harry shows you carries two numbers, both out of a hundred, and they measure deliberately different things.

Harry Hungry Score is the quality number. It’s a weighted blend of what every source thinks of the place — Google, Yelp, Tripadvisor, plus the critics, plus a quiet adjustment for how much each of those sources is full of it on any given evening. It asks a single question: is this place actually good?It does not ask what it costs. A nine-pound dosa stand and a three-hundred-pound tasting menu can both score in the nineties. They’re both, in their own universes, doing the thing very well.

Worth It Score is the value number, calculated separately. It asks the second, ruder question: given what they’re charging, is it worth it? A £300 dinner can be entirely worth it — if the room sings, the wine list isn’t a felony, and you leave wondering where the evening went. A £14 sandwich, on the other hand, can be a crime against bread. Worth It scores cheap places more strictly than you’d expect (because they have less to live up to) and expensive places more generously than you’d expect (because they have so much more to get wrong). It’s the score that tells you whether to feel clever in the morning.

The cardinal rule: Harry does not penalise expensive food for being expensive. That is what value is for. Quality is quality. Cost is cost. They are different conversations, and we refuse to mash them into a single mushy number, which is exactly what every other site does and exactly why every other site is useless when the question is special occasion.

† If both numbers are in the nineties, book immediately. If Harry Hungry is ninety and Worth It is forty-two, you’re looking at a great restaurant that has noticed it’s a great restaurant. Proceed with eyes open.

A short, incomplete, non-negotiable list. Consider it the house rules. Consider also that Harry has been violating these for free, on the internet, since before some of you were born.

1. 1.Tell you a place is “lovely”. Lovely is what your mother-in-law calls a starter she didn’t enjoy.
2. 2.Say “the wait was worth it” without telling you, in minutes, exactly how long the wait was.
3. 3.Penalise expensive food for being expensive. (See above. Worth It does the heavy lifting here.)
4. 4.Recommend a restaurant at Pier 39. There is no scenario. Not even if you are an actual sea lion.
5. 5.Trust a Tripadvisor review left by someone whose previous review was for an airport hotel in Crawley.
6. 6.Say “you must try the X”. Presumptuous. You must try nothing. You may, however, like to know that the X is unusually good — which is a different sentence.
7. 7.Use the word foodie. Not even ironically. Especially not ironically.
8. 8.Score a place higher because it has nice lighting and a tile we recognise from an interiors magazine. The plate, please. We are here for the plate.
9. 9.Describe anything as “a hidden gem”. If you found it on Harry Hungry, it is no longer hidden. We have already told people.
10. 10.Recommend a place because it is “Instagrammable”. Photographs do not have to be eaten. We have noticed.
11. 11.Bury the catch. If there is one — two-hour limit, no walk-ins, sharing plates only, a maître d’ with a documented vendetta against tourists — you get told, in the first sentence, in plain English.

The shorter list. The positive one. The bit on the back of the menu where the chef gets earnest for a paragraph.

• †Ten options, every search. Not nine, not eleven, and not a paginated forty-seven. Ten places, ranked, with their reasoning visible.
• †Two honest scores.One for whether it’s good. One for whether it’s worth what it costs. Different calculations. No mushy single number.
• †An honest Harry’s warning when there’s a catch. Two-hour limits, walk-ins-only doors, set-menu ambushes, tourist-trap risk, hidden service. If we know, you know, on the card, on the first line.
• †The reasoning, not just the verdict.Every score comes with the why. You may disagree with Harry. That’s fine. That’s the conversation. But you should at least know what he was thinking.