Field report · Denver, CO
Denver’s ratings tell the truth
Looking for Denver’s lowest-rated restaurants? Start a live hunt around downtown, or read our June 2026 findings: 49 of 147 returned listings rated 4.0★ or lower, about twice the share in our 18-city pool.
Hunt the worst in Denver →Free. No app. Starts downtown; pick your own range. Default filters hide chains and places with fewer than ten reviews.
Denver uses the whole scale
147 Denver restaurants from our June 2026 sweep, compared with the full 18-city pool.
of Denver’s sample rates 4.0★ or lower, versus in the pooled sample. These are historical search results, not a citywide census.
Aggregates from public Google ratings · full methodology. Ratings via Google Maps (Places API).
Why lower ratings are good news
Denver’s returned listings used more of the lower end of the scale than the pooled sample. A 4.0★ sounds high in isolation, but the comparison shows why a local distribution can help put that number in context.
In our June 2026 sweep, 49 of 147 Denver restaurants rated 4.0★ or lower. That is 33.3% of the sample, almost exactly twice the 16.6% pooled share. Denver’s median was 4.3★, a tenth below the 4.4★ pooled median, and five sampled restaurants fell under 3★. On the inflation files, we called that a more “honest” curve: a joke about the distribution, not a measured property of diners or restaurants.
These totals do not measure food quality or prove that Denver reviewers are more honest. They describe the listings Google returned to a particular set of searches. The live hunt can return different places and ratings; the research figures remain dated June 2026.
Caveat, honestly: this is a city-center sample, not a census of every Denver restaurant. Google returns twenty listings per search and favors the prominent ones. The comparison uses the same method across all 18 cities, and we publish only the resulting totals.
In an honest city, four stars can finally mean four stars.
Or read the New York report, where the bad restaurants never left.