About Idaho Eats

Who makes Idaho Eats, and how

Idaho Eats is an independent app and website by Nicholas Soderstrom: a free guide to 4,006 Idaho restaurants, with 80 hand-checked picks for Basque food, finger steaks and drive-ins, spud plates, huckleberry, Idaho trout, taquerías and historic saloons, plus 10 James Beard honorees. No account, no ads, no tracking.

Who makes it

Nicholas Soderstrom makes the Idaho Eats app and this site. Idaho Eats is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by the State of Idaho, Idaho State Police, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, any of Idaho's public health districts, any city or county, the James Beard Foundation, Apple, or any restaurant, team, university or chain.

How the lists are built

The Idaho guides are hand-checked: each place was checked in October 2026 against a 2025 or 2026 source (the place's own website or menu, or local news), with the address checked. Founding years mean the year it opened at this address. Resort-town places that close between seasons say so. Research records facts only, with a source for every place: no review text and no ratings from anyone. Places the research finds closed come off the lists. A guide gets its own page here once it has 4 places; until then it's in the app and the web search.

Honors are James Beard Foundation awards, nominees, semifinalists and America's Classics from 2023 to 2026, checked by hand against the Foundation's announcements.

The rest of the 4,006 places come from Overture Maps' open place data. High-confidence map listings are kept; single listings are marked Listing only. Tested against Denver's full list of food licenses (the same map data, in Colorado), high-confidence listings matched a licensed business 76% of the time. Website links are checked, and any that no longer belong to the place are left out.

Idaho's seven public health districts inspect restaurants, but none publishes results in bulk and none issues a grade or placard, so Idaho Eats has no inspection results; each place links its district's own lookup (how to look up an Idaho restaurant inspection). Ratings, reviews, hours and photos in the app are Apple Maps' own, shown live in Apple's place card; Idaho Eats doesn't store or rank by them.

Updates

This build's restaurant data is from November 3, 2026, from Overture Maps release 2026-09-23.1; the hand checks were done in October 2026. The data is rebuilt when the research or the open data changes, and corrections go into the next update. Places open and close, so check before you go.

Sources and licenses

Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org): restaurant listings and websites, release 2026-09-23.1, filtered and reformatted for Idaho Eats. Data from Meta, Microsoft, DAC and BrightQuery, available under the Community Data License Agreement – Permissive 2.0. Data from Foursquare, © Foursquare Labs, Inc., available under the Apache License 2.0; see the notice below. Data from AllThePlaces, available under CC0 1.0. License records and researched addresses are placed on the map with Overture Maps addresses data (open address sources under permissive licenses, docs.overturemaps.org/attribution).
Idaho State Police, Alcohol Beverage Control: the retail alcohol license list isn't in this version of Idaho Eats, so no place shows a license or whether it serves alcohol.
U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder (public domain): puts researched addresses on the map where Overture's address points don't reach.
Idaho's public health districts: their names, counties and inspection lookups, linked, not copied. Each lookup link was checked on October 8, 2026.
Honors: James Beard Foundation awards, nominees, semifinalists and America's Classics are reported as facts. James Beard Foundation and James Beard Award are trademarks of the James Beard Foundation. Other names belong to their owners.
Maps: county outlines from Overture Maps Foundation divisions, © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). In the app, maps, place cards and directions are by Apple Maps.

Foursquare notice

Foursquare OS Places Notice © 2026 Foursquare Labs, Inc. All rights reserved. The Foursquare OS Places dataset (the “Data”) is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”). You may not use, modify, or distribute the Data except in compliance with the License. As set forth more fully in the License, if you use, modify, or distribute the Data, you must: – provide recipients with a copy of the License. – if applicable, include prominent notices to the extent you’ve changed the Data. – preserve attribution to Foursquare, including preserving the full content of this NOTICE.txt file. To ensure appropriate attribution to Foursquare, we recommend the following: – if using/distributing the Data in flat file form as-is or after making changes/modifications: include this NOTICE.txt file, which may be modified to include an additional notice of your changes/modifications, if any. – if using/distributing the Data in API form as-is or after making changes/modifications: include a copy of the content from this NOTICE.txt file prominently in your developer documentation for such API, which may be modified to include an additional notice of your changes/modifications, if any. You may obtain a copy of the License at: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, the Data distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. We also encourage you to join our Placemaker community where you can contribute and provide suggestions to improve the accuracy of the Data for future releases for yourself and others. Notice of changes: Idaho Eats filtered the Data to eating and drinking places in Idaho, removed duplicates and closed, adult or unverifiable listings, and reformatted it for this app (2026).

Contact

Corrections, a missing or closed place, or anything else: nick@eatsranked.com. See also the privacy policy and terms of use.