Frequently Asked Questions

LunchHunch is simply a directory of restaurants and restaurant reviews currently covering the Los Angeles area. We are a social network style site that helps you find, save, and share great places to eat with your friends and the rest of the world.

LunchHunch was founded by two guys that were sick of not knowing where to go out for lunch while working at our real jobs. So instead of bemoaning the hardest decision of the day – day after day – we created this site to help you find great food and share it with the rest of us.

LunchHunch allows you to speak your mind about the good and the bad in the restaurant world. We make it easy for you to tell your friends, invite people to parties, get suggestions and search through the thousands of places out there that you might not even know about.

Membership is free and dead easy to sign up for. We only require a valid email and your first name. We collect other optional information to help give you the best recommendations for restaurants in your area. You can get started in less than 5 minutes right here.

The quick answer is because we are from Los Angeles and don’t care about the rest of you. Just kidding. Right now LunchHunch only covers Los Angeles because we are just starting out and don’t know much about the great food out there in other cities. We hope you’ll help tell us all about it and expand our support for other cities around the U.S. (and maybe one day the world)

There are a couple of different ways that restaurants will show up in our directory. Those with reviews and star ratings are shown as our primary results because it means another LunchHunch user has written and/or approved (or disapproved) of a particular restaurant. We consider your reviews the best source of information out there and thus the most important. Some places however just have not had anyone write about them yet, and we still will show these results because one day someone will want to write a review – and this just makes it easier.

Bookmarking is saving a page so that you can reference it at a later date. They work exactly the same way that your browser bookmarks work. You can only have one bookmark per restaurant by their very nature. Tags however are a description of a bookmark. Tags can help you reference a bookmark with the multiple descriptions, as well as share these descriptions with the rest of LunchHunch.

For instance you could bookmark five Italian restaurants "Italian". Two of the restaurants serve sandwiches, the other three do not. If you tag the two restaurants with "Italian" and "sandwiches" you can easily find exactly the restaurant you are looking for later. Also this helps us show you other places that are tagged the same way and can help you find a new favorite.

You should review any restaurant where you have eaten – whether the experience was good or bad, we want to hear about it! Your reviews can be 2 sentences or 5 paragraphs; it is entirely up to you. We do recommend you write clear and helpful reviews as other LunchHunchers will use what you have said to help make up their own minds.

The only items that are publically viewable are as follows: Your first name, your reviews, your bookmarks, and your user photo. Your user photo is optional so if you really do not want people to see you feel free to not upload one. There is a security option for you to hide your bookmarks if you do not want to share them – but remember we are all about sharing where the best places are, so we hope you will keep them on for other people to view. Your reviews are always public, but of course writing a review is completely optional.

Yes, you can do this any time from your account page.

Yes – your reviews are publically viewable. That’s the point of reviewing a place right?

A good review is an honest and fair review. We recommend you give a restaurant the best judgment you possibly can on everything from the food to the service. Don’t simply write a bad review for any old reason – write a review that is real and that will help other people find a place to visit. On the other side of the coin, do not always feel the need to give a restaurant the best review ever – it’s OK to be critical, and we hope you will be in a way that is constructive.

If you really want to then we suppose that it might be OK. We do discourage you from deleting your reviews unless you want to update your thoughts. Every review that gets deleted is one less that will help us share the best places to eat.

Generally no, but we do have a few rules:
- No reviews that are slanderous or libelous
- Please only write a review if YOU have actually visited and eaten at the restaurant
- No reviews with hate speech or other obscenities or vulgarities.
- Please do not post reviews that plug (read: Spam) your own blogs, websites, etc. Or are in anyway not relevant to the restaurant at hand.

Usually we will opt to hide the review until you can change it to something more constructive. Otherwise we may opt to delete it.

Like everything else on the site, the invite page is designed to be easy to use – and any changes that you make will be saved, and those changes will be emailed to everyone that was invited to your gathering.

Under the invite details there is a checkbox that says "Cancel this invite". Simply check the box and save the form. Your invitees will all be notified by email that the event is canceled.

If you need to un-invite a particular person you can remove their email address from the list of those invited which can be found on the invitation detail page. This person will receive an email that says the entire event has been canceled (we wouldn’t want them to feel left out after all).

Send us an email via our contact form and select "Cancel My Account" from the drop down list. Our support staff will then close your account. We hope you will take the time to let us know why you have decided to leave, and maybe any improvements we can make for the future.

Head on over to the contact us form, and send us a note. We will try to answer your question as best as we can – and if it gets asked enough we will update these FAQs with the answer.