ethics.city is a research preview covering part of Mid-City Los Angeles. It shows who owns and runs neighborhood restaurants, bars and cafés, with the evidence for each answer. Where the evidence doesn't settle a question, the card says so: missing information is never treated as proof that a place is independent or local.
AI research agents answer a fixed set of questions for every place: is it open, what is it called, is it part of a chain, who owns the brand, who runs this location, how many locations that operator runs and where it's based, and whether it is women-, LGBTQ+- or minority-owned. Each answer must cite a public record or quote a page we saved.
Then a second, independent AI model checks every answer against its evidence, and re-researches the most consequential ones from scratch without seeing the first answer: brand ownership, operator size, identity and a sample of the rest. Where the two disagree, a third review decides from the evidence, or the answer stays unknown. We measure the system against a separate answer key of 50 places, labeled independently by two other AI models and settled by a third. Each card shows the date its answers were checked.
Public records first: LA County Environmental Health permits and inspection history, California ABC liquor licenses, and City of Los Angeles business registrations. Then businesses' and brands' own websites, company and investment-firm announcements, news reporting and Wikipedia.
We don't use sites whose terms forbid automated access or collection, including Google, Yelp, social networks, most delivery and reservation apps, and some news and chain sites. Our research tool identifies itself and follows each site's robots.txt. The map shows facts and links to sources, never copied page text.
We record these only from a certification, or from the business or its current owners saying so in their own words. Never from names, photos, cuisine or guesses. Most places show "Unknown", which means only that we found no such statement. If you own or know a business, write to [email protected].
Each card ranks ways to buy from a place by how much of your money the restaurant keeps. Eating in or ordering at the counter or by phone costs it only card fees, about 3%. At sit-down restaurants and bars, eating in helps most because drinks carry the margin. Next is the restaurant's own online ordering (Toast, Square, ChowNow, Clover and others), which charges no commission. Some delivery companies sell a commission-free version for a restaurant's own website, such as DoorDash Online Ordering and Uber Eats Webshop, and Grubhub waives its commission for orders that arrive through a restaurant's own link. Ordering in the delivery apps themselves costs the restaurant 15–30% of the order for delivery and 6–10% for pickup. In a May 2026 National Restaurant Association survey, 45% of restaurants that use delivery apps said those orders aren't profitable.
Fees come from DoorDash's, Uber Eats' and Grubhub's published merchant pricing and the ordering companies' own pricing pages, as of September 2026. Ordering links come only from each restaurant's own website, and each card lists every option we found, best for the restaurant first. We link to any ordering site, but our research tool never visits the delivery apps.
Many businesses' owners of record are private individuals. The map never shows their names or home addresses. It names an operator only when it is the brand itself or a company with ten or more locations. Home-based and mobile businesses are not shown.
We count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which Cloudflare says “does not collect or use your visitors’ personal data.” The map sets no cookies. It remembers only whether you switched chains on, in your own browser.
Place listings come from Overture Maps Foundation, accessed September 21, 2026. Contributing sources represented in this dataset include Meta, Microsoft, BrightQuery, Foursquare, DAC, AllThePlaces, PinMeTo and RenderSEO. See Overture attribution, the CDLA Permissive 2.0 license, and Foursquare’s Apache 2.0 license and notice. AllThePlaces data is available under CC0. Brand matching also uses the Name Suggestion Index.
Basemap © OpenStreetMap contributors. Map software: Leaflet, BSD license.
Answers can be out of date or wrong: businesses change hands and close, and records lag. A brand's owner doesn't own each franchised location; a franchise pays the brand fees and royalties. A permit holder is who holds the permit, not necessarily everyone with a stake. The ownership log is a record of documented transactions, not a complete registry. Spot a mistake? [email protected].