How the directory is built

Where listings come from

Restaurant names, addresses, categories, business status, ratings, and review counts are compiled from publicly available sources and refreshed on a rolling basis. We do not write reviews, invent ratings, or estimate anything a source did not state.

Ratings and review counts are shown exactly as published by their source, with the source's own scale. A listing with no public rating shows none.

How a restaurant earns a listing

A record must pass every one of these checks before it appears anywhere on the site:

1. It is a sushi restaurant. Its category data must match our allowlist of sushi, Japanese, and poke categories. Steakhouses, hibachi grills, and general Asian restaurants that happen to serve a roll do not qualify.
2. It is open for business. Records marked permanently or temporarily closed are excluded.
3. It is in the United States (international listings live in their own section and never mix with US pages).
4. It is one restaurant, once. Duplicate records — the same place under two spellings or two addresses — are merged so the counts you see are counts of restaurants, not of records.

As of the last full audit, 16,000+ restaurants pass. The number on the homepage is that number, floored — never rounded up.

What we leave out on purpose

• Thin city pages. A city page is published only when it has at least 5 verified restaurants to rank. Smaller towns are still fully covered on the map — they just do not get a page that would be mostly empty.
• Padded guides. In July 2026 we retired hundreds of near-duplicate city guides and kept only the ones readers actually used. New guides are held to the same test.
• Non-sushi records. More than half of the raw records we had collected over the years were not sushi restaurants. They are gone.
• Rating badges we cannot substantiate. Star ratings and review markup appear only where they reflect a real, current source.

Rankings on city pages

City pages order restaurants by a blend of public rating and review volume, so a place with a 4.9 from six reviews does not outrank a 4.6 from six hundred. Sponsored placements are shown separately and always labeled. Nothing about a restaurant's position can be bought.

How often it changes

Listings refresh on a rolling basis; closures are removed as they are detected; counts are re-verified with each full audit. City pages automatically gain or lose their published status as their verified count crosses the threshold above — no page is kept alive for its own sake.