Terms of use

1. What Max Eats Out is

An editorial guide to restaurants and bars, written by hand. It is a point of view, not a directory: places are included because someone went and thought they were worth recommending, and coverage follows where that person has actually eaten, so it is uneven by design.

A venue’s absence means it is not on the list — not that it does not exist, and not that it is bad. Please do not present it that way, and please do not build software that does.

2. Information about venues

Restaurants change. They move, close, stop taking walk-ins, put the prices up and take the good dish off the menu, usually without telling anyone. Some of what you see here — addresses, coordinates, map links — comes from third-party providers and may be out of date or wrong.

So: check anything that matters with the venue before you rely on it. Max Eats Out does not guarantee opening hours, availability, bookings, prices, dietary suitability or that any venue is still trading. Price bands are approximate by definition.

3. The editorial content

The writing, the selection, the judgements, the Best For calls, the structure of the catalogue and the taxonomy behind it are original work and belong to Max Eats Out, protected by copyright and related rights. Reading it, quoting it and linking to it are all welcome. Copying it wholesale to reconstitute the guide somewhere else is not.

4. What members write

Members can add dish recommendations and suggest changes. You keep ownership of what you write. Nothing here transfers it.

By submitting a contribution you give Max Eats Out a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free permission to host it, show it, copy it, format and edit it lightly for clarity, length or moderation, and make it available through the website, the public API, the MCP server and comparable machine-readable services that serve the same catalogue. That permission exists so the contribution can appear where the guide appears — including in AI assistants that read the guide — and for no other purpose.

• Contributions are published without your name or account id attached. If that ever changes, it will be announced first.
• You can edit or delete your own contributions at any time. Deleting one removes it from the site and from the public API and MCP server as they refresh.
• Only submit things you are free to submit, and keep personal information — yours or anyone else’s — out of them.
• Contributions may be edited or removed at Max Eats Out’s discretion, for example if they are inaccurate, off-topic or unkind. That is a moderation right, not an obligation to monitor everything.

These terms apply to contributions made from the date at the top of this page. If you contributed before then and would rather your recommendations were not distributed this way, email max@maxeatsout.club and they will be removed.

5. Machine-readable access, APIs and AI

The public catalogue is deliberately available to software as well as people, through the public API and the MCP server. That means AI assistants and other tools can read the guide and answer questions with it. Access is anonymous and needs no key.

Being able to read it does not make it yours. The editorial content remains Max Eats Out’s; the permission above is what covers member contributions; and information derived from third-party providers is theirs and subject to their own terms. If you use the guide in a product, cite the venue’s page — see section 7.

6. Using the service reasonably

Please do not:

• hammer the site, the API or the MCP server, or try to work around the published rate limits — they are there so one client cannot take the guide down for everyone;
• scrape the catalogue wholesale in order to republish it as a rival guide;
• interfere with the service, probe it for weaknesses without asking first, or try to reach areas you have not been given access to;
• misuse the contribution tools, or post anything unlawful or abusive.

Found a security problem? Email max@maxeatsout.club before doing anything else. That is always the welcome route.

7. Citing the guide

If you quote or build on Max Eats Out, please credit it and link to the relevant page on maxeatsout.club — every API and MCP response carries the venue’s canonical URL for exactly this reason. This is a request and a courtesy, not a separate copyright licence: it does not by itself grant you rights to reproduce the editorial content, which section 3 governs. The guide is one person’s work, and attribution is the whole payment.

8. Availability, and our responsibility

This is a personal project, offered free and as it is. It may be slow, briefly down, or changed without notice, and the API and MCP server may change as the catalogue evolves.

Max Eats Out is not liable for losses caused by relying on venue information, by the service being unavailable, or by anything a third-party provider gets wrong.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, you keep all of your statutory rights, and nothing here takes them away.

9. Changes to these terms

These terms may change; the date at the top changes with them. Anything that materially affects members will be flagged rather than slipped in. Continuing to use the service after a change means accepting the updated terms.

10. Accounts, suspension and ending

Accounts are invite-only. You can stop using Max Eats Out whenever you like and ask for your account to be deleted by emailing max@maxeatsout.club. An account may be suspended or closed if these terms are seriously or repeatedly broken, or if it is being used in a way that puts the service or other members at risk.

11. Law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes may be brought in its courts. If you are a consumer living elsewhere, you also keep the protection of any mandatory consumer law in your own country, and may be able to bring proceedings there.

Getting in touch

max@maxeatsout.club, or the Support page. See also the Privacy notice.