目利き — The Discerning Eye
Mekiki answers one question well: where should I actually eat? Ask the way you'd ask a friend who eats everywhere — “need to impress my in-laws, nothing spicy,” “the best omakase for an anniversary” — and you get five answers, chosen with judgment, with the reasoning spelled out.
Mekiki (目利き) is the Japanese word for a discerning eye — the connoisseur who can judge quality at a glance. That's the standard we hold the list to: five picks we'd defend in person, not fifty links to scroll.
How Mekiki decides
In our curated cities — Houston, New York, and Chicago — every restaurant we recommend has been profiled ahead of time: what the kitchen is actually known for, the dishes people return for, how the room feels, who it suits. Recognition from the MICHELIN Guide, the James Beard Foundation, and AAA is woven in, with the judgment that a Bib Gourmand means a great moderate-priced meal, not a cheaper star.
Everywhere else, Mekiki scouts on demand: it reads the neighborhood for the first time while you wait — usually a minute or two — and applies the same standards to what it finds.
Your question is treated as a real brief, not a keyword search. Cuisine is a hard constraint. “Best restaurant” means somewhere you'd sit down and remember. Dietary needs are taken literally, and when we can't verify something, we say so instead of guessing.
Where the facts come from
Listing details — addresses, phone numbers, websites — are powered by Google. Award recognition comes from the MICHELIN Guide, the James Beard Foundation, and AAA, credited where it appears. The judgment layered on top of those facts is ours.
Privacy
Mekiki has no accounts and sets no tracking cookies. What we keep is minimal and operational:
- The text of queries and the locations you ask about, kept for up to 90 days to improve recommendations, then deleted. Please don't include personal details you wouldn't want stored.
- Thumbs-up / thumbs-down feedback, kept with the query that produced it — it's how Mekiki learns what a good answer looks like.
- If you join the waitlist, your email address — used only to send an invite. No marketing lists, no resale.
We don't store your IP address in our database; infrastructure providers (Vercel, Render, Neon) keep standard short-lived request logs. Map tiles are served by OpenStreetMap. To have your waitlist email or feedback removed, write to valkrie@gmail.com.