About Menu Scout
An independent, opinionated directory of fast-casual and quick-service restaurants across the United States.
What Menu Scout was
Menu Scout was a directory built around a single category of restaurant: fast-casual and quick-service. That's the part of the food world where you order at a counter, the food comes out in five to ten minutes, the average ticket is somewhere between $10 and $20, and you're not expected to tip 20 percent on the way out. It's where most American adults actually eat lunch on a weekday, and where a surprising amount of the country's most interesting independent food is being made.
The directory used to catalog restaurants in that category and present practical information — menu highlights, hours, address, phone — in a layout that was easy to scan on a phone. As explained below, that directory has since been removed.
What we don't do
We don't review fine-dining restaurants, full-service tasting menus, or destination experiences. There are publications that do that better than we ever could. We also don't run a reservation system, a delivery marketplace, or an ordering platform. When you find a restaurant on Menu Scout that you want to try, you go directly to the restaurant — no intermediary fees, no apps to download.
The directory has been removed
Menu Scout's directory previously held 540 restaurant listings across 30 cities and 12 cuisines. Each listing was an illustrative fast-casual profile — a representative name, menu, price range, and menu highlights for the cuisine and city it was filed under — rather than a verified record of one specific real-world storefront. We disclosed that on this page at the time, but on further review we concluded that presenting template-generated names, addresses and phone numbers as individual restaurant listings was more misleading than useful, disclosure or not. We've removed the directory in full: every restaurant page, every city page, every cuisine page, and the ranking pages that linked to them. We have not replaced it with new placeholder content, and we won't.
If you arrived here from an old link to a city, cuisine, or restaurant page, that content no longer exists on this site.
How we make money
Menu Scout is supported by display advertising and (eventually) a small amount of clearly-marked sponsored content. We do not take payment from restaurants in exchange for inclusion or for higher placement. If that ever changes, we'll say so plainly on this page.
Who's behind it
Menu Scout is a small, independent project. It was built because the existing food directories were either built for a different category of restaurant or were so cluttered with ads, login walls and pop-ups that they became unusable on a phone in line at the register. We thought the fast-casual category deserved its own clean, fast, opinionated home — so we built one. That home is now this thin, honest site rather than the directory it used to be.
Contact
For questions about this page or general inquiries, see the contact page.