Dish ratings

Dish ratings let customers rate the specific dishes they ordered — not just the restaurant overall — so you learn exactly which items delight and which disappoint. Ratings can be rewarded with loyalty points to encourage participation, customers can only rate dishes they’ve actually purchased, and you moderate reviews from the admin dashboard before they influence what other customers see.

Where to find it

Moderation and management: Dashboard → Settings → Misc → Rate the Dish (/configuration/rate-the-dish/list) in your admin dashboard. Rating analytics live in reports at /reports/dish-ratings, with written feedback at /reports/feedback-reports. Requires admin access. Customers rate from the customer app.

What customers see

In the customer app, dishes display the ratings other customers have given them — social proof exactly where the ordering decision happens. That’s the flywheel: ratings improve customer confidence, confident customers order more, more orders generate more ratings. It’s also why moderation matters; what stands on a dish page influences real orders.

Why per-dish ratings beat star averages

A restaurant-level 4.2 stars tells you almost nothing actionable. Per-dish ratings tell you the lasagna is a 4.8 and the calamari is a 3.1 — which is a menu decision waiting to happen. Use them to:

• Find your real bestsellers — high rating + high volume = lead with it on the menu.
• Catch quality drift — a dish whose rating slides after a recipe or supplier change is your early-warning system.
• Decide what to cut — low rating + low volume items cost menu attention and kitchen prep for nothing.

How customers rate

After ordering, customers rate dishes from the customer app. Two guardrails keep the data trustworthy:

• Purchase-gated — a customer can only rate a dish they’ve actually ordered. No drive-by ratings from people who never tasted the food.
• Rewarded once per dish — if you incentivize ratings with reward points, each customer earns the incentive only the first time they rate a given dish. They can update their rating later, but can’t farm points by re-rating.

Points turn silence into signal

Most happy customers say nothing. A small reward-point incentive per rating reliably multiplies participation — and because the incentive is once-per-dish-per-customer, the cost stays modest while the data compounds.

Getting started

1. Open Dashboard → Settings → Misc → Rate the Dish (/configuration/rate-the-dish/list) and review the feature’s configuration for your outlet.
2. Decide whether to incentivize ratings with reward points — if your loyalty program is live, a small per-rating reward is the single biggest participation lever.
3. Place a test order with your own account and rate a dish from the customer app, so you’ve seen the customer-side flow end to end.
4. Check the rating appears in the management list and in the /reports/dish-ratings report.
5. Add a weekly moderation pass to whoever owns customer feedback.

Moderating ratings

Everything customers submit is manageable at Dashboard → Settings → Misc → Rate the Dish (/configuration/rate-the-dish/list). From there you can review what’s coming in and act on entries that shouldn’t stand — abusive text, ratings clearly aimed at a delivery problem rather than the food, or test entries from your own staff.

Moderation is worth a brief, regular pass rather than an occasional purge:

• Skim new entries a couple of times a week.
• Don’t remove ratings just because they’re low — a genuine 2-star on the calamari is the most valuable data on the page.
• If a bad rating describes a fixable service issue (cold on arrival, missing addon), treat it as an operations lead, not a reputation problem.

Reading the reports

Two report views turn ratings into decisions:

• Dish ratings (/reports/dish-ratings) — per-dish scores and volumes. Sort low-to-high before a menu revision; sort by volume to see which ratings actually have enough data to trust.
• Feedback (/reports/feedback-reports) — written customer feedback, where the why behind a score lives.

Small samples lie

A dish with three ratings doesn’t have a real score yet — one grumpy customer is a third of the average. Weight your decisions by rating volume, and let new dishes accumulate data before judging them.

For ratings to mean anything across time, keep dish identity stable: if you materially change a recipe, consider whether the old ratings still describe the new dish — sometimes a relaunch under a new menu item is more honest than inheriting a score the kitchen no longer earns.

Putting ratings to work

• Menu engineering — pair ratings with sales data from Reports & analytics: high-rating low-sellers may just need a better photo or position; see Building your menu.
• Recipe checks — re-test any dish whose rating drops noticeably after a kitchen change.
• Staff feedback loop — share the top-rated dishes with the kitchen; it’s rare, concrete praise that reaches the people who cooked it.

A simple quarterly exercise: list your dishes in a 2×2 of rating vs sales volume.

	Low rating	High rating
High sales	Fix the recipe — people order it and leave disappointed	Protect it: never change supplier or recipe casually
Low sales	Cut it	Promote it — better photo, higher menu position, a campaign

And close the loop with customers where it counts: when a low-rated dish gets fixed, a marketing campaign announcing the “new and improved” version turns yesterday’s critics into your cheapest testers — see Marketing campaigns.

Related: Building your menu · Reward points · Reports & analytics