FOUNDER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Snket Desai
Charlotte, NC (previously New York City)
Sanket is a Senior SEO Manager with deep experience building and scaling data-driven digital products. At CoinDesk, he helped grow organic traffic to over 15 million monthly visitors and a Domain Rating of 90, working across technical SEO, content strategy, and programmatic page generation at scale. At Capital One Shopping, he contributed to growing organic sessions to 7.4 million, focusing on the intersection of data engineering and search visibility.
Eat Real Food NYC was born from a personal need. After years of living in New York City and spending too much time cross-referencing Yelp reviews, Google Maps ratings, and the NYC Health Department inspection database just to find a restaurant that was both healthy and clean, Sanket decided to build the tool he wished existed. The result is a directory that combines official government health data with verified dietary information in a way that no other NYC restaurant resource does.
The technical architecture behind Eat Real Food NYC — from the data pipeline that ingests and cross-references three separate data sources, to the programmatic SEO layer that generates optimized pages for every borough, neighborhood, and diet type combination — reflects the same approach to data-driven product building that Sanket has applied throughout his career.
EXPERTISE
VERIFICATION PROCESS
How our data gets verified
Eat Real Food NYC does not rely on a single data source. Every restaurant listing in our directory is built from three independent data layers that cross-reference and validate each other.
Government records
The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene provides the foundational layer: inspection grades, scores, dates, and violation records. This is the only source of official food safety data in New York City, and we pull it directly from the NYC Open Data portal.
Business listings
Google Maps Platform provides business-level data: verified addresses, operating hours, phone numbers, user ratings, and review volumes. This layer confirms that a restaurant exists, is currently operational, and gives us the user sentiment data that feeds into our Health Score.
AI-assisted analysis
Our dietary tagging pipeline uses Claude AI to analyze each restaurant's cuisine type, public menu data, and business description to assign dietary tags. Every tag is subject to the conservative tagging policy described in our editorial standards, and spot-check reviews are conducted regularly.
Help us improve
Eat Real Food NYC is a living project. If you have local knowledge about a restaurant in our directory — a dietary tag we missed, a grade that has changed, a restaurant that has closed — your input directly improves the resource for everyone.