Mudl lists cocktail bars it has read. This page says where each part of a listing comes from, what the score is an opinion about, where AI does the work, and what keeps a room off the site. Everything below is checkable against a listing.
Where the venues come from
Two sources, doing two different jobs. The base record — name, address, coordinates, category — comes from Foursquare's open dataset. It establishes that a place exists and where it stands.
Everything after that is ours. We find the venue's own website, read it, read what the room publishes publicly, and build the listing from that. Descriptions, hours, menus, vibe tags, photos and the score are Mudl's work off first-party sources — not a copy of somebody else's listing.
Photos are the venue's own material or a member's upload, stripped of metadata and served from our servers. A photo we cannot host ourselves is not shown.
Google is a search tool here and nothing more — we use it to help find and confirm the right place, and nothing it publishes is stored or shown on Mudl. What a listing says is read off the room's own site and what it shares publicly, not copied from other guides.
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How menus are read
A menu comes from the bar's own site — the page, the PDF, or the image it links. We keep the address it came from and the date we read it, so any menu on Mudl can be checked against its source.
Item names and prices are facts, and we publish them as facts. A bar's own written descriptions are its writing, so we summarize rather than reprint them.
Menus move. A menu we cannot verify is marked unverified rather than filled in from guesswork, and a menu the operator has confirmed is marked confirmed. When a room is claimed, the operator's menu replaces ours.
What the Mudl score means
Every room we judge is scored on a scale from 1.0 to 5.0. It is an opinion — ours — assembled from stated criteria rather than from votes, and it weighs four things:
- The cocktail program, 40% — what is on the list, how it is built, how far it goes: original drinks, house-made ingredients, seasonal rotation, range.
- Standing, 25% — awards, named citations, and how many separate publications have written about the room. A bar named in eight is doing something a bar named in two is not, and that counts on its own.
- The room, 20% — the space itself and the visual evidence for it.
- Cocktail focus, 15% — how central drinks are to what the place is.
The scale is absolute, not a curve. A room is judged against the whole country, so a town with a shallow bench has no rooms near the top of the scale, and a room is never marked up or down because of how another room in the same city scored.
What it is not: a crowd rating, a verdict on food, service or value, or a place in a ranking that anyone can move. Claiming a room does not change its score.
The number itself is ours, not the room's, so we keep it off the listing rather than show it beside a five-point scale it was never meant to answer to. It still decides which rooms we publish and how we order them within a city. A published rating appears once enough members have rated a room.
Why stars only appear at three reviews
The stars are Mudl members rating a room, averaged. They are separate from the score above, and they are the only number in a listing that comes from the public.
Below three ratings, no average is published. One person's night reads as a verdict on a bar, and it is not one. The number of ratings travels with the average, so it is always visible how much is behind it.
Where AI does the work
Mudl uses AI models to read venue websites, extract menus, draft descriptions, tag rooms and apply the scoring criteria above. That is the plain description of how the work gets done, and it belongs on this page rather than in a footnote.
What stays with people: the criteria, the review queues and the decisions. A venue whose identity or website we cannot confirm is held for a person to settle with evidence instead of being guessed at. A market opens when someone has read the city, not when the data lands. And any room can be pulled by hand at any time, including because you told us to.
What keeps a room off Mudl
The doubt always falls the same way — a room stays off. A venue is not published when:
- it has no cocktail program: a brewery, a dive, a restaurant bar with a well and nothing more;
- it is closed, or we cannot establish that it is still open;
- we have not read it yet — an unread room waits rather than appearing as an empty listing;
- we cannot confirm which website is actually the venue's;
- it fails the quality check, in which case it stays unlisted until something changes.
A listing with nothing in it is worse than no listing. Held-back rooms are a normal outcome here, not a backlog.
Corrections
Tell us and we will fix it. Operators can claim their room and edit it directly — the menu, the hours, the photos. Anyone else can write to [email protected]. A wrong fact does not need to come from the owner to get corrected, and a room that wants off the site can say so.
More about who we are is on the about page.