Our promise
The opposite of the apps.
EOLA Today is Orlando's actually-local platform: a city guide, a home for independent businesses, and local delivery with couriers we employ. Here's what we hold ourselves to, in plain words, so you can hold us to it too.
Independent businesses only.
Every place we list is independently owned in Central Florida. No national chains, no franchises, no corporate locations. This one is non-negotiable.
Local goods, not national brands.
Shops here sell what's made, grown or crafted in Central Florida. Owning a shop in Orlando doesn't make a can of Red Bull local. What shops can sell
Real photos of real food.
Every photo of a dish or product is a picture of the real thing, the way it shows up. No AI-generated or AI-faked images, ever. What you see is what you order. Our photo rules
Employee couriers, not gig drivers.
The people carrying your food work for us. They're trained, scheduled and accountable, and they know the restaurants because they're in them every day.
Flat, fair fees.
Restaurants pay a flat fee per order, not a cut of it. Our pilot proposal is $2.50 an order: on a $40 dinner, that's $2.50 to us instead of about $12 to the big apps. We'll tune the number with our first partners, but it stays flat.
Locals answer the phone.
When something goes wrong, you reach a dispatcher down the street, not a call center. We live here, and we write for people who live here.
Sponsors fund it. They never steer it.
Sponsorships are public, fixed-price and fenced off from what we cover. A sponsor never gets a listing and never buys a ranking. How sponsorship works
Your data stays here.
We count views and taps ourselves, with no ad trackers and no cookies. If you sign in, we use what you look at and save to pick places and events for you. We never sell it or share it, and you can switch it off or wipe it anytime. The details
Why we do this
Orlando shouldn't look like everywhere else.
Drive down any big road in town and you'll see it: the same drive-thrus, franchises and big boxes you'd find off any highway in America. Their profits leave town, and every one of them sits on a corner where a local place could have been.
We're not neutral about that. We're on the side of the family restaurant, the corner shop and the person roasting coffee in a garage off Mills. Chains have national ad budgets and apps that take a third of every order. We want local places to have the tools and the audience to win anyway.
And we hope it reaches past the places already here. If you've been thinking about opening a spot, launching a product or turning a side hustle into a storefront, we want this to be what makes the leap worth it: a local audience from day one, looking for exactly what you make. More local owners, more local products, more neighborhoods worth walking. That's the Orlando we're building for.
Who we list
What counts as local
The line is ownership, not size. If the money and the decisions stay here, you're in.
Counts
- Owned by people who live in Central Florida
- A local mini-chain: a handful of spots, owner lives here
Doesn't
- National chains, even with a local manager
- Franchises of a national brand, even locally owned ones
- Corporate-owned locations of any size
What shops sell
What counts as a local product
Being a local shop gets you listed. What you sell here has to be local too. The line is where it was made, not where it's sold. Not sure about something? Ask us before you list it.
Counts
- Made, grown, roasted, brewed or baked in Central Florida, by the shop or another local maker
- Finished here from materials that came from elsewhere: a shirt printed in town, a candle poured here
- Resold from another Central Florida maker, credited to them
Doesn't
- National brands, even on a local shelf: Red Bull, Coke, big-box snacks
- Mass-produced goods with a local label stuck on
- Print-on-demand or dropshipped items made and shipped from out of state
Photos
No AI-generated images
A photo on a menu is a promise about what shows up at your door. Generated pictures look great and tell you nothing, so they don't go up here. No photo is better than a fake one. Spot one that doesn't look real? Tell us and we'll take it down.
Counts
- Photos of the actual dish or product, as the place really makes and serves it
- Normal touch-ups: cropping, brightness, color correction, a clean background
- Phone photos are fine. Real beats polished.
Doesn't
- Images made or filled in with AI image generators, even "just for now"
- AI edits that change the food: bigger portions, extra toppings, a better-looking plate
- Stock photos, or another restaurant's pictures of the same dish
Your data
What we count, and what we don't
- No cookies and no third-party trackers. Page views and taps go to our own server, and nowhere else.
- We count visitors with a code that changes every day, so we can tell how many people came, not who they were or where they went yesterday.
- Raw page views are deleted after 90 days. What we keep after that are daily totals.
- Businesses and sponsors see totals: how many people viewed a listing, called or asked for directions, saw a sponsor. Never names, emails or who did what.
- Signed in, what you view, save and order from shapes "Picked for you". An order counts as the place, never what you ordered or where it was delivered. See it, remove any of it, or turn it off on your interests page.
- Age range and home neighborhood are optional, and only ever reported as totals. Nobody under 18 is shown targeted promos.
See it for yourself.
Every place in the guide is one we'd send a friend to.