We open one city at a time, all the way down.
Reading a city properly means cleaning twenty years of its licence record until you can say what happened at a single address. That is not something you do for fifty cities at once, and a shallow read of your city would be worth less to you than no read at all.
So here is exactly where we are, including the cities we checked and could not do. We do not put dates on any of it — we have opened one city, which is no basis for promising when we will open another.
Every restaurant licensed here since 2002, at every address.
Chicago
record from 1995Live. Every restaurant licensed since 2002.
The record is complete enough to build on. This is where we go next.
San Francisco
record from 1849The record is complete and downloadable — San Francisco publishes a closing date for every business location, which is the thing most cities do not.
The data exists but is missing something we would need to be honest about survival. Listed so you can see the reasoning rather than wonder.
Austin
record from 2023Austin publishes inspections rather than licences, and only from 2023, so there is not yet enough history to say anything honest about survival.
Los Angeles
record from 1921Los Angeles publishes only businesses that are currently open, so its history exists solely in archived copies — which reach back to 2021, not 2002.
New York
record from 1900We have assembled 28 archived snapshots back to 2015, but the city stopped publishing for three years in the middle and that period cannot be recovered.
We looked, and the public record cannot support the product. Here is why.
Kansas City
Same as Seattle — a general business register with no way to tell a restaurant from a hardware store.
Seattle
Seattle's licence data does not separate restaurants from every other business, and no archived history was found.
Somewhere else?
Tell us where you are looking. We rank which city to open by who is actually asking, so this is the most direct influence anyone has over what we do next — including for the cities above that we have not solved yet.
One email, only if your city opens. No newsletter.