Editorial Policy & Standards
Restaurants Brighton started in September 2011, when our founder Nick Harvey began scribbling down all the good places he’d eaten around the city. What began as a bit of a hobby turned into something people actually relied on, and over 15 years later we’re still doing the same thing: celebrating inventive menus, warm hospitality, and the hardworking people behind Brighton and Hove’s food scene.
These days we’ve got a proper audience across the city and beyond, and we don’t take that lightly. We’d like you to know how we work. What we do, what we won’t do, and how we keep this whole thing running.
1. Positively Spirited
We’ve always believed in championing this city’s food scene. Running a restaurant, cafe, pub or Brighton bar is hard, human work, and we know it. If we visit somewhere and it’s not quite right, we don’t rush off to post about it. We tell the owner or head chef directly instead, so they’ve got a fair chance to sort it out. That way, everything we do publish is a genuine “yes, go here, for this”.
If it’s on Restaurants Brighton, it’s because we actually think it’s worth your time and your money. That doesn’t mean everyone will love it – nobody likes exactly the same things – just that we do, and we’re happy to put our name to it.
2. Local and Human
Everywhere you look these days there’s AI search summaries, scraped “best of” lists, and content nobody actually wrote. We’re not doing any of that.
Real experience: every reel, photo, guide and review on this site comes from real people who live in Brighton, actually sit at the tables, eat the food, and chat to the teams.
No shortcuts: we don’t publish automated, scraped, or AI-written restaurant content. An algorithm can’t taste a sauce, feel the buzz of a dining room, or understand what it takes to run a kitchen on a Saturday night. We can.
Are we experimenting with AI to check for typos and offer suggestions for edits? Of course we are. We are living in 2026 too.
That said, we know that your AI summaries will be better if they use the information we provide. If these new-fangled predictive text machines are going to tell you about restaurants, we’d rather they learn from us.
3. Detail, Depth and Accuracy
We know you need the actual details to decide where to eat, not just nice adjectives. So wherever we can, we try to include:
Price ranges and what you’re getting for your money.
Specific dishes worth ordering, and clear dietary info (vegan, gluten-free, halal).
The actual people behind the food: chefs, owners, front-of-house teams, and local producers.
And we go back and check our features and offers regularly, so you’re not turning up to a deal that expired months ago.
4. Sustainability and Ethical Food
We care about the health of this city’s food scene, not just as a guide but as part of it.
Partnership: we’ve collaborated with Brighton and Hove Food Partnership for many years.
Local and seasonal: we back menus that prioritise local, seasonal, low-impact ingredients.
Sustainable seafood: working alongside groups like the UNESCO Living Coast, we help people understand which fish to eat and which to leave alone, for the sake of the sea.
Living wage and fair work: we’re a certified Living Wage Employer ourselves, and we back venues that look after their staff properly.
5. Community Investment
This bit matters to us. We’ve worked with the University of Brighton to build a sustainability toolkit for restaurants, we run Women in Hospitality events, and we’ve supported university research into how the industry can better support women working in it locally. We’ve even co-authored a chapter in a book on sustainable seafood tourism (yep, that’s niche).
We also run the BRAVOS – a public-voted restaurant award open to any venue in Brighton and Sussex. The categories are deliberately varied, so as many venues as possible get a fair shot at entering and winning.
And when we run events, we bring in students from Brighton MET College to help – good experience for them, and an extra pair of hands for us.
All our hospitality events, sustainability project work, as well as the BRAVOs are open to all venues, regardless of whether they pay us or not.
6. Commercial Transparency and Funding
We’re a small, local team, and running things properly – proper photography, video, the tech behind the site, actual editorial time – costs money. So venues who want extra marketing reach can pay for a partnership with us.
Here’s our approach:
- The whole city, not just our clients: loads of the venues we feature or talk about haven’t paid us a penny. We include them because they’re new or brilliant or we think they are cool or we know them and trust what they do, and you deserve the full picture of what Brighton has to offer, not just our client list.
- No paying for nice words: a commercial package pays for our time, our photography, and our reach – it never buys a good review. Every venue we work with, paying or not, has to actually be good.
The Bottom Line
We’re real people, running a real (small) business, writing about real places. If you’re after a quick midweek bite, planning something special, or buying a gift voucher to say thank you, we’re here to point you somewhere good.
If you run a venue in Brighton, Hove or Sussex and fancy talking about working with us, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch and we’ll take it from there.
Got a question about any of this, or ideas for how we could do this better? Please get in touch, we are always happy to listen.
Ivanka and Team RB