About Wisconsin Eats

Who makes Wisconsin Eats, and how

Wisconsin Eats (“WI Eats”) is an independent app and website by Nicholas Soderstrom: a free guide to 16,346 Wisconsin restaurants, with hand-checked lists of 402 Friday fish fries, 211 supper clubs and 28 custard stands. No account, no ads, no tracking.

Who makes it

Nicholas Soderstrom makes the Wisconsin Eats app and this site. Wisconsin Eats is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by the City of Milwaukee, Public Health Madison & Dane County, the James Beard Foundation, Apple, or any restaurant, team or chain.

How the lists are built

Fish fries, supper clubs, custard stands and icons are hand-checked: each was checked in September 2026 against a 2025 or 2026 source (the place's own website or menu, local news, or its Travel Wisconsin listing), with the address checked. 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.

The rest of the 16,346 places come from Overture Maps' open place data, the City of Milwaukee's active food and tavern licenses, and Public Health Madison & Dane County's licensed establishments. Map listings are kept only when they proved reliable: checked against Milwaukee's and Dane County's license lists, high-confidence listings matched a licensed business 75–79% of the time. Website links are checked, and any that no longer belong to the place are left out.

Inspection grades are ours, graded on a curve from Dane County's routine inspections since January 2023. They are our summary, not official grades, and other counties don't publish inspections in bulk. Ratings, reviews, hours and photos in the app are Apple Maps' own, shown live in Apple's place card; Wisconsin Eats doesn't store or rank by them.

Updates

This build's restaurant data is from October 7, 2026; the hand checks were done in September 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 outside the Milwaukee and Dane County license lists, filtered and reformatted for Wisconsin 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.
  • City of Milwaukee Open Data: active food dealer and tavern licenses, modified for use here. The City of Milwaukee makes no warranty as to the data's accuracy, completeness or timeliness and does not endorse Wisconsin Eats.
  • Public Health Madison & Dane County: licensed establishments and routine inspection results, modified for use here. Public Health Madison & Dane County makes no warranty as to the data's accuracy, completeness or timeliness and does not endorse Wisconsin Eats.
  • Honors: James Beard Foundation awards, finalists, semifinalists and America's Classics, and the other honors shown, are reported as facts and checked by hand against public announcements. James Beard Foundation and James Beard Award are trademarks of the James Beard Foundation.
  • Maps: county outlines © OpenStreetMap contributors and Overture Maps Foundation (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: Wisconsin Eats filtered the Data to eating and drinking places in Wisconsin, 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: work-with-nick@gmail.com. See also the privacy policy and terms of use.