Thawq
ذوق
Food worth the drive, found by taste — not paid hype.
8,659 restaurants in Jeddah. Not one of them paid to be here.
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The mark
The star is not decoration. It's the dot.
Put a star above د and it becomes ذ — the first letter of ذَوْق, thawq: taste, and the discernment to know good from loud.
Which is the whole product in one glyph. Every place you rate lights a star in your sky, and those stars are what complete the word.
The problem
Every list you've read was bought.
Sponsored top-tens. Comped tables. Influencers flown in for the opening. The ranking you trusted was an invoice, and you ate the consequences.
Thawq has no ad inventory, no promoted placements, no "featured" tier. There is nothing to buy, so there is nothing to sell you.
For You
Not a feed. A short list.
Rails built from rules, not engagement bait — places your twins rated highly, spots near you open right now, cuisines you keep returning to.
Dine-in and delivery are scored separately, because a place that's transcendent at the table and tragic in a box is two different answers.
For You
Tuesday · Jeddah
Your twins loved
Open now, near you
Al Baik — Corniche
3 twins rated this 9+
Suhail
You saved this in March
Nozomi
Strong on dine-in
The Atlas
Your history, as a sky.
Every restaurant you've rated becomes a star. Rate more and constellations form — the shape of what you actually like, drawn by where you've actually eaten.
Nothing is invented. An empty sky stays empty; we never pad it with places you haven't been.
Your sky
148 stars lit · 12 constellations
Taste twins
A twin isn't a follower. It's a statistical claim.
Two people are twins when their ratings have agreed often enough that coincidence stops explaining it. We compute the agreement, and we only use the word above 0.75.
Below that line they're a stranger with opinions, and we say so. No surface in the app calls someone a twin without the number behind it.
Layla · agreement 0.82 across 34 shared places
The engine
How a score is actually made.
No black box worth hiding. Four stages, and the member term always beats the imported one.
Taste profile
Your ratings become a vector — cuisines, dishes, price, and the gap between how you score dine-in versus delivery.
Dish priors
18,259 dish-level signals. A place isn't "good"; it's good at something, and that something has to match what you order.
Twin weighting
Ratings from people above the 0.75 line count for more than the crowd. Agreement is earned, not followed.
Bayesian blend
Member scores are weighted by volume against a prior. One glowing review moves a place a little — thirty move it a lot.
Tonight's Stack
Five places. Tonight only.
Not an endless scroll designed to keep you here. Five, chosen for tonight, and then the app is done talking.
It resets at 4am, not midnight — because dinner in Jeddah doesn't end when the date does.
Tonight
Five, then we stop
What's inside
Built, not mocked up.
Jeddah first.
We're opening to twenty people who care more about the food than the photograph of it. If that's you, you already know.