Restaurants & Dining: the URL category for eating out
Restaurant websites, table bookings, food delivery and dining reviews. This page explains what the category holds, where it stops, and how filters for schools, offices, guest Wi-Fi and families usually treat it.
It is written for product teams at firewall, DNS filter and parental control vendors who license category data and need to know exactly what a label means before they build policy on it.
OverviewWhy a dining category exists at all
Restaurants & Dining is not a security category. Nobody is harmed by a pizza menu. It exists because policies, reports and products need to tell lifestyle browsing apart from work, study and risky content.
A clean dining label lets an office see how much lunch ordering happens on the network, lets a school close delivery apps during lessons, and lets a hotel Wi-Fi portal recommend its own restaurant instead of a competitor.
ScopeWhat the Restaurants & Dining category includes
The test is simple: does the site help someone choose, order, book or review a meal prepared by someone else? If yes, it belongs here.
Independent restaurants
Single-location restaurant websites with menus, opening hours, photos and contact details, including fine dining and family places.
Chains and franchises
Quick-service and casual dining brands with store locators, nutrition pages, loyalty sign-up and franchise information.
Cafés and bakeries
Coffee shops, tea rooms, bakeries, dessert bars and juice bars that serve on site or for takeaway.
Food delivery platforms
Apps and sites that aggregate many restaurants and deliver prepared meals to the door, plus their courier sign-up pages.
Table reservations
Booking platforms, waitlist tools and the reservation widgets restaurants host on their own domains.
Dining reviews and guides
Restaurant review sites, city dining guides, critics' columns and award lists focused on where to eat.
Food trucks and pop-ups
Mobile kitchens, market stalls and pop-up dinners with schedules and locations.
Catering and events
Caterers, private dining rooms and banquet venues that sell prepared food for events.
Menu and ordering hosts
Branded ordering pages and QR menu domains a restaurant uses as its storefront, when the domain belongs to the venue.
Delivery-only kitchens
Virtual brands and delivery-only kitchens with their own ordering sites, even without a dining room.
Restaurant groups
Corporate sites of hospitality groups that mainly present their restaurant portfolio to guests.
Dining offers
Restaurant gift card, deal and dining club sites whose main subject is eating out.
BoundariesExclusions and neighbouring categories
Most labelling disputes in this category sit on its edges. These are the rules we apply, so you can predict the label before you look it up.
Stays in Restaurants & Dining
- A gastropub whose site leads with its food menu and table booking
- A delivery app that also sells some groceries, when restaurants are its main offer
- A city guide page that ranks the best places to eat
- A hotel's own restaurant on a separate domain
- A coffee chain's mobile ordering and rewards site
- A street food market's vendor list and opening times
Goes to a neighbouring category
- Recipes, cooking blogs, food brands, kitchen gear: Food & Drink
- Bars, breweries and wine bars that sell drinks first: Alcohol, see alcohol and tobacco filtering
- Supermarkets and grocery delivery: Shopping
- Hotels and resorts with a restaurant page: Travel
- Point-of-sale and kitchen software sold to restaurants: Business or Computers & Technology
- Restaurant job boards and staffing agencies: Job Search/Careers
Rule of thumb: if the visitor is a diner, it is Restaurants & Dining. If the visitor is a cook, it is Food & Drink. If the visitor is a restaurant owner buying tools, it is Business.
RecognitionTypical site types and how they are labelled
The table shows common site types, the signals on the page that point to them, and the categories they usually carry. Order matters: the first label describes most of the site.
| Site type | What the site shows | Usual categories |
|---|---|---|
| Neighbourhood bistro | Menu, hours, map, booking button | Restaurants & Dining |
| National pizza chain | Store finder, online order flow, deals, nutrition PDF | Restaurants & Dining |
| Multi-restaurant delivery app | Restaurant listings by area, cart, courier tracking | Restaurants & DiningShopping |
| Reservation platform | Search by city and time, availability grid, guest reviews | Restaurants & Dining |
| Craft brewery taproom | Beer list, tasting events, small food menu | AlcoholRestaurants & Dining |
| Food critic's blog | Long reviews of specific restaurants, star ratings | Restaurants & DiningBlogs/Personal Sites |
| Recipe and cooking site | Ingredients, method, cooking videos | Food & Drink |
| Hotel with signature restaurant | Rooms, rates, spa, one dining page | TravelRestaurants & Dining |
| Restaurant POS vendor | Pricing plans, hardware, demo request for owners | BusinessComputers & Technology |
| Hospitality job board | Chef and server vacancies, CV upload | Job Search/Careers |
You can check how any single domain is labelled with the domain category lookup tool, which returns every category on the domain in ranked order.
PolicyHow different networks usually handle dining sites
These are common defaults, not rules. Each organisation sets its own policy, and dining is one of the categories where local culture and working hours shape the decision.
| Environment | Typical setting | Why | Common refinement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schools (CIPA) | AllowLimit ordering | CIPA targets obscene and harmful visual content. Restaurant sites are outside its scope. | Block delivery ordering for students during school hours; keep menus open for nutrition and life-skills lessons |
| Businesses | Allow | Ordering lunch or booking a client dinner is normal work behaviour. | Report on time spent; apply quiet-hours rules on production floors or call centres |
| Guest Wi-Fi | Allow | Guests look up nearby places to eat. Blocking it frustrates people for no gain. | Venues may promote their own outlets on the splash page; bandwidth shaping is rarely needed |
| Parental control | Allow browsingAsk for orders | Browsing menus is harmless; spending money is the concern. | Require approval for delivery apps on younger children's devices; pair with payment controls |
| Healthcare wards | Allow | Patients and staff order food. The category carries no clinical risk. | Some sites restrict delivery to staff networks for building security |
Need the wider picture for hospitality networks? See our guide to web filtering for restaurants, which covers staff and guest networks inside the venue itself.
NuanceMulti-category cases you will meet
A domain can carry several categories, ranked by how much of the site each one describes. Dining sites overlap with other categories more often than most, so ranking is what keeps your policy precise.
Brewpub
AlcoholRestaurants & DiningDrinks dominate the site, food is second. A school that blocks Alcohol blocks it; an office that allows dining still allows it.
Delivery super-app
Restaurants & DiningShoppingAlcoholMeals first, groceries second, a liquor tab third. Some parental control apps act on any Alcohol label; most policies act on the first label.
Resort with restaurants
TravelRestaurants & DiningRooms and packages lead. Dining is secondary, which matters for hotel portals that promote their outlets.
Food review channel site
Restaurants & DiningStreaming MediaVideo-heavy restaurant reviews. Bandwidth rules may act on the second label.
Casino dining page
GamblingRestaurants & DiningA casino resort's restaurant listings sit on a gambling domain, so Gambling ranks first. See gambling site filtering.
Meal kit service
Food & DrinkShoppingCustomers cook the food themselves, so it is not dining out. Restaurants & Dining is usually absent.
EvaluationChecks to run before you trust any dining label
Whether you evaluate our data or another source, these checks show quickly if a dining category is built with care or simply guessed from domain names.
Content checks
- Pick ten local restaurants with plain names and confirm none are labelled Food & Drink only
- Look up three brewpubs and see whether Alcohol ranks above dining where drinks lead
- Test delivery apps and check that grocery-only services are not mixed in
- Check a few hotel domains: Travel should lead, dining should follow
- Try a recipe site with "kitchen" or "bistro" in its name: it should not be dining
Freshness checks
- Look up a restaurant that opened recently in your city
- Find a venue that closed and see if its domain is now parked or for sale
- Check a delivery-only brand that only exists on an ordering page
- Test a seasonal pop-up whose site changes every few months
- Compare international chains across country domains
Why closures matter: restaurant domains expire often. A lapsed domain can be bought and reused for anything, so a dining label that never gets refreshed can become wrong. That is why all domains are refreshed monthly and new ones are re-checked after a week and a month.
Licence holders also receive validation reports with measured accuracy, so product teams can see how the categories hold up over time instead of relying on spot checks alone.
Product useHow vendors use the Restaurants & Dining label
Few customers ask a vendor to block restaurants. Many ask for reports, nudges and context that only a reliable dining label can provide.
Guest Wi-Fi and hospitality platforms
Show venue owners what guests browse, and steer captive portal offers towards the venue's own food and drink.
Firewall and SWG vendors
Fill the general interest part of the policy editor so admins can build time-of-day rules without custom lists.
Parental control apps
Separate harmless menu browsing from spending, and prompt parents when a child opens a delivery app.
DNS filtering services
Give small business customers a full category picker so allow-lists stay short and readable.
Productivity analytics
Group lifestyle browsing into clear buckets, so a dashboard reads "dining" rather than a list of unknown domains.
Contextual advertising
Combine Restaurants & Dining with matching IAB Content Taxonomy categories to place food ads next to food content.
Vendors usually license the whole web filtering database rather than one category, because dining only makes sense next to its neighbours.
RolloutPutting the category into a product
A short path from file to working policy, for teams that embed the data in their own filter.
- Load the categories with their ranksKeep every label on a domain, not only the first one. Ranked labels let you treat a brewpub differently from a bistro.
- Decide which rank triggers an actionMost products act on the first label for allow decisions and on any label for sensitive categories such as Alcohol.
- Expose dining as a general interest categoryPlace it beside Food & Drink, Travel and Shopping in the policy editor, with a clear description of the boundary.
- Add schedule supportDining is the classic time-based rule: open at lunch, closed in lessons or shifts. A category without schedules is of limited use here.
- Apply daily deltasNew restaurants and delivery brands launch constantly. Daily delta files keep new venues labelled while the rest of the file refreshes monthly.
- Use the lookup API for missesLicences include a lookup API, useful for the rare domain that is not yet in your local copy.
QuestionsRestaurants & Dining category FAQ
Is Restaurants & Dining a risky web filtering category?
No. It is a low-risk lifestyle category. Most organisations allow it and use it for reporting, productivity rules and context rather than security blocking.
Are bars and pubs in Restaurants & Dining or Alcohol?
A venue that is mainly a restaurant carries Restaurants & Dining. A venue whose main offer is drinks carries Alcohol first, often with Restaurants & Dining as a second label.
Where do recipe sites go?
Recipe sites, cooking blogs and food brands belong to Food & Drink. Restaurants & Dining is for places that serve food and services that help people order, book or review a meal out.
Should schools block food delivery sites?
CIPA does not require it. Some schools block ordering and delivery during lessons for focus or campus safety reasons, while leaving menus and restaurant pages open.
Can a domain be in Restaurants & Dining and another category at once?
Yes. Domains can carry several categories, ranked by how much of the site each one describes. A brewpub can be Alcohol first and Restaurants & Dining second.
How fast do new restaurant domains get a category?
About 300,000 newly registered domains are categorized every day. Each is checked again after a week and after a month, because new venue sites often launch as a holding page and add menus later.
Does the category cover restaurant apps as well as websites?
The database is domain based. Mobile apps for ordering and booking call domains in the background, and those domains carry the same Restaurants & Dining label, so DNS and firewall rules apply to the app traffic as well.
What happens to a restaurant domain after the venue closes?
Monthly refreshes pick up the change. A closed venue's domain often becomes a parked or for-sale page, and it then moves to the Parked / For-Sale Domains category instead of keeping its old dining label.
Is there an IAB equivalent for dining?
Yes. The IAB Content Taxonomy has food and dining related categories, and both taxonomies are delivered in the same file, so ad-tech and filtering teams can work from one source.
Can vendors license this category for their own product?
Yes. It ships inside the full database for internal use or OEM embedding, with the other 58 categories and the IAB taxonomy. Starter database tiers start from $999; enterprise and OEM licences are quoted per deployment.
Put dining, and 58 other categories, into your filter
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