Kulu’s directory has always grown through the community, but adding a new restaurant used to mean waiting on a regional manager to get to it. If you were standing outside a place that wasn’t on the map yet, there wasn’t much you could do in the moment.
That’s changed. Any signed-in Kulu user can now add a missing restaurant directly, right from the app, and it shows up for everyone else right away.
How it works
Search for the restaurant the same way you’d search for anything else in the app. If it’s not already in Kulu, pick it from the results and add it. That’s it, no form to fill out, no address to type in. Kulu pulls the name, location, and other basics straight from the same place data the search box already uses, so what you add is accurate from the start.
The restaurant goes live immediately. We built it this way on purpose. A directory is only useful if it reflects what’s actually out there, and the people best positioned to notice a gap are the ones standing in front of it.
Keeping the directory honest
Opening this up to everyone means we had to think carefully about what could go wrong, and build in the right guardrails.
A restaurant can only be added once. If someone else already added the place you’re looking at, Kulu recognizes it and points you to the existing listing instead of creating a duplicate. There’s also a daily limit on how many restaurants any one person can add, so the feature stays useful without being easy to abuse.
We also limit what kind of place can be added at all. Kulu only accepts places that fall under food and drink, restaurants, cafes, bakeries, bubble tea shops, and similar, so someone can’t add a dry cleaner or a dentist’s office to a restaurant directory, by accident or otherwise.
Within food and drink, we go a step further and leave out bars, breweries, pubs, wine bars, and other venues that are primarily about alcohol. Kulu exists to help people find halal-friendly places to eat, and those venues don’t fit that purpose, so they’re excluded from what can be added, whether someone tries to add one on purpose or just picks the wrong result by mistake.
Something look wrong? Tell us
Adding a restaurant only gets you the basics, the name, the address, where it sits on the map. Everything beyond that, halal certification, prayer space, atmosphere, and more, still comes from the community answering what they’ve seen.
If you ever spot something that’s not right, a restaurant that shouldn’t be there, a listing with the wrong details, we want to hear about it. Reach out through our support page and let us know what needs correcting. We read every message.
This is one more piece of the same idea behind everything we build: the community knows the ground truth better than we ever could, our job is to give people a straightforward way to share it, and to put the right limits in place so that trust doesn’t get abused. So next time you’re somewhere good that isn’t on Kulu yet, add it. The next person searching that block will be glad you did.
