AreaFavs

In order to be eligible to participate as a restaurant on AreaFavs.com, you must have a small business restaurant to participate as of January 2026. (AreaFavs.com defines a small business restaurant as one that does not have more than 7 chains in any one state.) You must pay the yearly 1x fee. You may make changes 3x per year (or no more than every 4 months) BUT nothing that alters the poll that provided your top 5 of any single menu. Additionally, you must have been in business for at least 6 months, and should have reason to believe you have sufficient regulars to engage with for your poll.

AreaFavs.com allows any participating restaurant to list + poll a menu they intend to keep for the next 365 days, so long as there are no less than 10 items on it. (Yes, this means not all kids menus will qualify.) Since our site’s goal is to help restaurants reach new people, we want to draw them to whatever menu type they gravitate toward for a more authentic experience. We anticipate this helping your restaurant as well so that you don’t get disappointed newcomers who then may not come back simply because on that particular night they only wanted [xyz] type. This also means that if you teeter on 7 or 8 on a menu type, you might consider adding to it over the next year so that it can be included in your poll by “regulars” next year. Menu types can include: breakfast, brunch, bakery, snacks, sides or appetizers, kids menu, lunch, dinner, full course meals, adult drinks, and desserts, as well as sandwiches, pizzas, seafood, steak, or an ethnic (style if that’s a specific menu type from your point of view; ex: italian may be a type of offering but other offerings might include seafood or steak). If you have a unique menu type that differs from what we’ve listed here, you can still provide it when you enroll and we’re happy to do our best to accomodate so long as we feel it’s in our site + user’s best interest and it does not encourage re-listing the same dishes 2 or more times. **Note: While polls are for 10 or more offerings on any given menu type, should you opt to upload photographs a la carte to your business page, you may include all menus, including those that have fewer than 10. (Just remember that the photo is per year pricing, and there is a la carte pricing for making any changes to any one photo as well, but no more than 3/year, or every 4 months, whichever is greater.)

We expect restaurants to know their customers, and know first-hand who they see regularly. However, we do ask in the poll if the person has tried at least 3 dishes, and how many times they expect to order their favorite. YOUR CONDITION: We also ask the “regular” whether or not they are employees or received discounted food. It’s in your ethical best interest to not request regulars who receive a discount beyond a discount offered to all to participate in your poll. Discounts such as military or senior, or a special on “Wednesdays” for example would qualify. Discounted meals for employees or their direct family, or your extended family, etc do not qualify. While we can’t stop this, we rely on your own understanding that whatever is listed is permanent for a year, and those that have a choice of other places and still choose your one particular dish will help you ensure you get your own marketing on your business page right.

Yes!! We have no problem with you using your business page for review to your customers. Part of the reason we offer this in our service is so that you have a business page that focuses on what people appreciate about you most, and the basics of what potential new customers should know about you. We know that people interested in making plans to try new things, or anyone looking for something specific, will often turn to online searches – and it’s our goal to be the newest and favorite “go to” for people seeking new places. We also understand that many small restaurants struggle at first with the cost of getting online, so we’re here for that too. So long as you’ve paid for the year, you have the QR code and the business page (ex: provinceORstate.areafavs.com/city-business-name). We know having the small business restaurant page online alone (while limited in uploaded photos) is worth the cost of participation for some and may be the main reason many will want to participate — & that’s great!

Short answer: No, except with the monthly newsletter during your initial year. We offer the newsletter as helpful tips that encourage you to fully engage your customers, embrace community, and instill your intended full “experience” you and your customers will appreciate most. This includes offers, but never direct solicitation. Instead we expect that if you wish to take part in consultations, purchases, or ideas, you determine all that on your own and we only provide details to companies of interest to restaurants so you can reach out to them, rather than the other way around. Beyond that, we’ll remind you when things get closer to your renewal for participation and yearly poll, but that’s it. **However, we do ask during the year how things are going for you – IF you wish to share. We want to be open to feedback to grow the company and do the best we can in assisting users and restaurant participants, but you don’t need to feel obligated to respond if you’re asked. We’ve heard our competition annoys many restaurant owners through solicitation, but we’ve chosen a business model that allows us to help small restaurants without annoying them or demanding a ton of money every month or for the year.

Our AreaFavs business model is designed to lessen the number of work hours, which keeps things affordable. To do this, we do expect participating restaurants to provide their own photos of their food. We do need to maintain a site with increasing traffic, but aside from that, we’re in this to partner with businesses and on purpose we hope to stay as affordable as possible. If pricing increases significantly over a one-year span, any reason will be posted, so you can see how and what we do to work for you “behind the scenes” that created the need for the cost increase. However, we fully intend to establish a rapport as the easiest to iuse for users AND the least expensive + the easiest to use for all our participating restaurants. (Just think: no more reviews to respond to or worry about!) Still, we also recognize that this concept base of a “food photo directory” instead of review-based cooncept is newer to most people and that participation may come with a bit of hesitation, so we’ve purposely made it low-cost for your initial year… to make it hard to say “no.” (There, we admit it.) This way you can try us and we continue to build our service base state by state or province by province, and city by city. We think you’ll like it, and we hope to serve you and restaurant-goers all over North America more and more, for many years to come. We’re just a small business helping other small business restaurants.

We’ve prepared a year’s worth of helpful creative, marketable, and engaging tips and tricks as well as restaurant services, with a different topic for 11 months. Some of these are simply ideas, while other are services, or involve consultations you may consider and why they may OR may not be best for you. We do this as a free service that we believe may help you gain more participation with area locals as well as newcomers, to make a lasting impact and bring about an intended experience to meet and keep your intended audience of interest. Every restaurant is different, so each should decide what might work for them. For this reason, there will be a lot of questions to consider asking yourself. (We fully support the idea that restaurants should do everything they can before paying money to others, but it’s our biggest desire to see restaurants not just stay in survival mode but thrive, and we hope AreaFavs will even make it easier for restaurants across the country to help keep small restaurants hopping!) That said, in years to come we will offer edited versions of likely the same type of newsletter. If you wish to receive the newsletter again, you may do so for a small fee at the beginning of any following year. *While newsletters are digital in nature and are provided to you by email only, whether during the initial year or any year thereafter, the reason for the cost is because returning users will be tallied for the type of restaurant, and we’ll ask you to provide any specific reason for it, so we can note it and then work to build re-edited versions towards the type of restaurants or specific service people stay to keep up with again. (Cost considered will likely only be $5-8/year.) Our newsletters come with limited time special discounts or offers that we understand some will wish to try for in the future – our affiliated companies we work with when building the newsletters will likely wish to know, so they can better construct the right type of offers, etc.

As AreaFavs exists to serve users (those wishing to try new restaurants), we do require all participating businesses to also participate in a poll so that we can designate the right answers of top 5 “favs.” We anticipate every user turning to our site over others to do so because they like the visuals but the don’t wish to compromise the honesty behind the experience of others. For that reason, we require without exception, that every business do a yearly poll. (Only the dates of the poll may be changed from year to year, if needed and requested ahead of time.) *We will not keep up a site small business restaurant page without a yearly poll that produces results and that we then receive photos from within 3 weeks or 21 days from a participating restaurant being emailed the results of the poll. We reserve the right to suspend at the restaurant’s expense (temporarily or permanently) our services for any restaurant we believe is not attempting to honestly participate in a poll – because our AreaFavs polls are in lieu of “honest reviews” our users seek.