Who we are
The Plate Debt team builds the Plate Debt app for iPhone and writes the all-you-can-eat guides on this site. Plate Debt is made by Ilium Studio, an independent app studio.
Every guide is signed by the team rather than one person, because each one goes through the same process: the dish values come from the app's catalog, and every outside fact is checked against a source we link.
Why Plate Debt
All-you-can-eat is a bet. The restaurant is betting you fill up on rice, bread and noodles. You are betting the other way. Plate Debt turns that bet into a game you can actually score: enter what you paid, tap every plate, and watch whether you cover your bill at menu prices (PAID) and then whether you ate food that cost the restaurant more than you paid (beat the house).
How we value a plate
Each of the 319 dishes in Plate Debt carries two numbers.
- Menu value: an estimated a la carte price for one standard portion, based on typical US restaurant prices and adjusted for your city. When three or more diners report a price at the same restaurant, the app uses their median instead. You can also fix any price yourself.
- Restaurant cost: an estimate of what the ingredients on that plate cost the restaurant, from wholesale prices minus trim and cooking loss.
Both are estimates, made for fun, not exact figures and not financial, diet or medical advice. For now every dish uses US prices in US dollars. Prices for other countries are coming in a future update.
How we write our guides
- Our numbers are labeled. Plate values in a guide are Plate Debt estimates from the same catalog the app uses, and a script checks them against the catalog before a guide is published.
- Outside facts are sourced. Prices, time limits, leftover fees and house rules come from articles and restaurant pages we have opened, linked with the publication and the date.
- Every guide is dated. Each one shows when it was last updated, and we change that date only when the content changes.
- No sponsors. Nothing on this site is paid placement, and we are not affiliated with any restaurant we mention.
Corrections
Spot a wrong price, an outdated rule or a closed restaurant? Email support@platedebt.com. We fix confirmed errors and update the guide's date.
Contact
For help with the app, see Support. For anything else, email support@platedebt.com.