How food walks work on Mosey, and how to follow one

A food walk on Mosey is a short route through one neighbourhood: the places close together, put in the order of the shortest walk, with the distance from each stop to the next. It is a way to eat your way down a street without planning the route yourself, and you can read one on the Mosey site without an account.

What a food walk is

A walk is not a ranking. It takes the places in a single neighbourhood that sit close together and sorts them so the trip between them is as short as it can be. A place is on it because it is close to the others and well rated, not because someone judged it the winner. Nobody can pay to be on a walk.

Each walk page shows how many places it has, how far the whole walk is from end to end and roughly how long it takes at an easy pace. Every stop shows its rating, so you can see what people said before you set off.

How the stops are chosen

Mosey looks at the places in a neighbourhood that have a page on the site, and keeps the ones nearest the middle of the group. A walk has up to eight stops and is kept short enough to do on foot in one outing. Places that have closed for good, pop-ups and hotels are left out.

The distances are straight lines between two places, so a real route can run a little longer. The page says so, and it draws the route as a simple map with a text list beside it, so you can follow the list without the picture.

Where to find one

Walks live on the Mosey site, on the guides page and on a neighbourhood's own page, wherever enough places sit close together. If your neighbourhood has no walk, it usually means too few places nearby have joined Mosey yet. A walk can appear as more places are rated. You can read about the idea on the food walks feature page.

How to use a walk well

Pick a walk, then decide what you want from it. Some people treat it as a tasting route and order one small thing at each stop. Others use it to choose a single place from a short list that is already in walking order.

Read the ratings and photographs first. Our guide to reading restaurant ratings and photos explains what to look for. If you are in Kilkenny, a food lover's walk through Kilkenny shows the same idea written by hand, and the Kilkenny page lists the places themselves.

Go at a quiet time if you can. A walk with several stops works best outside the busiest hour, and a place that takes bookings may hold a table if you ring ahead.

After the walk

The walk pages are for reading. The Mosey app is where you keep the places you liked on a list, rate each meal with a photo from the table and book or order at the places that take bookings. Rating what you ate helps the next person choose, and it is how a neighbourhood earns enough ratings to be worth a walk. For a wider view of what people rate highly, see the ranked lists.

If you walk through Dublin, our day of eating in Dublin by neighbourhood gives a second way to plan the day.

Who a walk suits

A walk suits a visitor with a free afternoon, a group of friends who cannot agree where to eat, and anyone who lives nearby and has never looked past the first place on their street. It also suits a slow day: you can stop at the first place, decide you have had enough and head home, with no loss. Because the stops are close together, a walk is easy to cut short or to stretch with a coffee between two stops. Check the opening hours of each stop before you leave,, since a place that is open at noon may be shut mid-afternoon.