How Parm Score works
Google Maps ranks restaurants. ParmWorld ranks the parm. A place can be a solid neighborhood Italian overall and still serve a middling cutlet — and a steakhouse can hide an excellent one. Parm Score is a 0–100 ranking built for one dish family: chicken, veal, and eggplant parm.
What goes into the score
- Quality (up to 50 points). A Bayesian shrink of the Google rating toward 3.8, so a 5.0 from twelve reviews does not outrank a 4.6 from hundreds.
- Volume (up to 15 points). A log boost from Google review count, so well-documented places surface without drowning quieter spots.
- Parm evidence (up to 30 points). How often reviews mention chicken, veal, or eggplant parm — and whether those mentions are glowing or damning — plus 10 points when the dish is on the restaurant’s own menu.
- Extra verification (up to 5 points). Optional Foursquare match when you turn on extra verification.
- Pizza-primary penalty (15 points). Pizzerias without strong parm evidence are pulled down so a great slice shop does not fake a parm ranking.
Menu checks
We read each ranked restaurant’s own website and look for chicken, veal, and eggplant parm on its menu, including PDF menus. A listing confirms the dish is served; reviews still decide how good it is. We recheck menus every one to two months and stop counting a result after four months without a recheck. Our checker identifies itself and respects robots.txt. If your restaurant’s menu was misread, tell us.
Quality floor
By default we hide places under 3.5 stars or fewer than 20 Google reviews. You can turn that filter off. Pizzerias, steakhouses, and American rooms with no parm mention in reviews (or in the name) stay hidden — a great steakhouse still has to look like a parm destination. “Parm confirmed” keeps only places with the parm confirmed by reviews, the name, or their own menu. Veal and eggplant rankings only list confirmed places.
What Parm Score is not
It is not a guarantee the dish is on the menu tonight, that the kitchen is having a good night, or that our ranking matches your grandmother’s. Ratings, photos, hours, and addresses shown next to the score come from Google Maps. The score itself is ParmWorld’s own ranking.
User reviews
When enough ParmWorld readers rate a restaurant, we can show an aggregate of our reviews on that restaurant’s page. Until then, Google stars stay on the page with attribution and are not marked up as our structured data.