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Press & Media Kit

Methodology, embed code, citation format, and editorial briefs for journalists covering Toronto's restaurant scene.

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How it works

Every night the pipeline pulls Toronto's business licence registry from the City's open-data CKAN portal (158k rows, refreshed daily), filters to restaurant categories issued in the last 365 days, deduplicates against OpenStreetMap and Wikidata chain databases, classifies each entry by cuisine via Claude Haiku with web-search verification, and cross-checks DineSafe inspections and social media signals to confirm the location is currently operating.

A second gate cross-checks every candidate against Toronto Public Health's DineSafe inspection record. If DineSafe inspected the establishment at the same address and name more than 180 days before the licence-issued date, the licence event is treated as a re-licensing of a pre-existing restaurant (ownership transfer, suite renumbering, licence-type addition) and the entry is suppressed - this is how MAKILALA-class long-operating places stay out of the "newly registered" feed even when their City paperwork looks fresh. Only restaurants verified as currently open at the licensed address are shown.

The displayed "First seen" date is the earlier of the City licence-issued date or the first Toronto Public Health DineSafe inspection, whichever proves the restaurant was actually operating. Roughly 72% of currently-tracked restaurants have a DineSafe match by address + name; for those, the inspection date is used (a public-health officer physically present in the kitchen is a stronger proof of operation than the paper filing). For the remaining 28% with no DineSafe match, the licence date is used as the fallback. This is what other Toronto restaurant aggregators can't do: BlogTO and Yelp don't cross-reference the inspection record, so their "newly opened" signals lean on press releases and social mentions. The City + Public Health cross-reference is the project's primary differentiator.

Embeddable widget

Drop a fresh feed of newly registered restaurants into any blog post or news article. The widget renders a small card with the 3-5 most recent licences for a cuisine or district, links each card to its restaurant page, and includes a footer attribution link back to NowServingTO. No iframe - the rendered links count for SEO.

Basic usage:

<div data-nsto-embed data-cuisine="vietnamese" data-count="5"></div>
<script src="https://nowservingto.com/embed.js" async></script>

Supported attributes: data-cuisine (any of the ~50 cuisine keys), data-district (downtown, east-toronto, etobicoke, north-york, scarborough, west-toronto), data-count (1-10, default 5). Use both data-cuisine and data-district to get the intersection. Loads asynchronously, ~4 KB script, no jQuery.

Live preview:

Citation format

If you use our numbers or feed in a story, please credit us. Recommended language:

Source: NowServingTO.com, daily-tracked from the City of Toronto's business licence registry (Toronto Open Data, refreshed nightly). Last updated July 13, 2026.

Plain HTML:

Source: <a href="https://nowservingto.com/">NowServingTO.com</a>,
daily-tracked from the <a href="https://open.toronto.ca/dataset/municipal-licensing-and-standards-business-licences-and-permits/">City of Toronto business licence registry</a>.

For diaspora editors

We maintain dedicated weekly editorial briefs for select diaspora communities - live, auto-updating, designed to be lifted verbatim or used as research. Each brief carries the registered-this-week count, the past-12-month total, the full card grid of recent registrations, and a district-density bar chart:

If you edit a publication serving a diaspora community in Canada and want a custom feed (your cuisine, your region of Toronto, your cadence), email us - we'll wire it.

Contact

Editorial / data / partnerships
hello@nowservingto.com

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