Data sources and notices
Freshoku surfaces new Toronto restaurants detected from the City of Toronto's open DineSafe data, and from its business-licence records for a place DineSafe has not inspected yet, located on the map through the City's Address Points. Licence facts come from the City's Municipal Licensing and Standards data, neighbourhood and Business Improvement Area (BIA) names from the City's boundary files, and contact and social links from open point-of-interest data (Overture, Foursquare). Each fact is tracked with its own source and licence. Freshoku stores no Google Maps data. Its Google links (Maps, Search) are plain searches for a place's name and address, and no Google rating, review, or place detail is shown.
What Freshoku records about YOU - a random device id, used only to count visitors - is covered on the privacy page.
City of Toronto - DineSafe
Detecting genuinely new restaurant openings, from food-premises inspection records, and the map location of each inspected place.
Licence: Open Government Licence - Toronto
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - Toronto.
City of Toronto - Municipal Licensing and Standards, Business Licences and Permits
Licence facts (business type, licence issue dates, licence status) attached to a detected opening, and detecting a new opening from its first eat-or-drink licence before DineSafe has inspected it.
Licence: Open Government Licence - Toronto
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - Toronto.
City of Toronto - Address Points (Municipal)
The map location of a place listed from its business licence before DineSafe has inspected it, looked up from the licence's street address.
Licence: Open Government Licence - Toronto
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - Toronto.
City of Toronto - neighbourhood and Business Improvement Area (BIA) boundaries
The neighbourhood and BIA district name shown on a listing and used to filter the map.
Licence: Open Government Licence - Toronto
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - Toronto.
Overture Maps Foundation - Places
Place facts (name matching, categories, website and social links) used to enrich a detected opening.
Licence: CDLA-Permissive-2.0
Includes data from the Overture Maps Foundation, licensed under CDLA-Permissive-2.0.
Overture's places dataset bundles records contributed by multiple organizations; CDLA-Permissive-2.0 does not require per-contributor attribution, so we credit the dataset as a whole.
Foursquare OS Places
Place facts contributed to Overture places records (Overture bundles Foursquare data), used the same way.
Licence: Apache License, Version 2.0
Includes data from Foursquare OS Places, (c) Foursquare Labs, Inc., licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
OpenStreetMap contributors, via Protomaps
The basemap (roads, land, water, place labels) the map renders.
Licence: Open Database License (ODbL)
Protomaps (c) OpenStreetMap contributors.
What the labels mean
A listing carries a few short labels for what Freshoku knows about a place, and how firmly. Some are read straight from the sources above, and name those records. Others rest on a published page found by searching the web, which is not a licensed dataset, so those are described by what they mean rather than by where they came from.
"no details yet" - the place turns up only in the City's inspection records so far. Its type, website, and socials have not been confirmed against any other source, so the listing shows none of them. It says nothing about the inspection itself, which can still be a pass.
"no inspection yet" - the City has licensed the place to serve food or drink, and DineSafe has no inspection of it on record yet. The listing comes from the City's business-licence records, its age reads "licensed N days ago", from the day the licence was issued, and its map location is looked up from the licence's street address. It says nothing about whether the place would pass an inspection.
"first licensed YYYY" - the earliest year on the City's licence records for this business. A year well before the first inspection usually means a long-running business rather than a new opening.
"inside a venue" - the place shares an address with enough other food premises to read as a counter or stall inside something larger: a food hall, a stadium, a hospital.
"truck or cart" - the place's name in the City's inspection records marks a mobile vendor or a commissary kitchen rather than a room you can walk into.
"opened N days ago" / "opens in N days" - a published source names the day this place opened, or the day it says it will. It is a different fact from the age at the top of the listing, and a listing can carry both: "detected 40 days ago" is when the City's inspection records first showed the place - the age the Newest order sorts on - while "opened 12 days ago" is when the doors opened. A place has to pass an inspection before it can serve anyone, so detection often comes first.
"opening soon" - the same claim with no day named: a published source says the place has not opened to the public yet, even though the City already has a record of it: an inspection, or a business licence.
"just opened" - the place has exactly one inspection on record and nothing older. It is the weakest newness signal here, so it shows only while no business licence, open map data or web search has given details of the place.
"DineSafe Pass" (or "DineSafe Conditional Pass") - the verdict from the City's most recent food-safety inspection of that place. The date beside it is that inspection's, and it appears only where the City has been back since its first visit: a place with a single inspection on record carries the badge undated, because the listing already gives that day as when the place was detected. Only a passing verdict gets a badge; anything else is left to the DineSafe record itself, which every inspected listing links to.
Questions or corrections
Freshoku is made in Toronto by Yuya Iwabuchi. Questions about this data, corrections to a listing, and takedown requests all go to [email protected].
If you run a place listed here and want it removed, write to that address and name the place. It goes on a removal list that every daily update honours: the place leaves the map, the list, its own page, the area pages and the sitemap, usually within a few days. The removal list records only the City's DineSafe record number (or its business-licence number, for a place DineSafe has not inspected), the date and a short reason - never your name, email address or message. The place stays off when the City links its record to a new record number; if it reappears under a record number the City does not link, write again. A phone or browser that visited the page before can show its saved copy until it is next online.
Automated requests from this project identify themselves as FreshokuBot and link back to this page. If you would rather Freshoku did not fetch your site, say so at that address.