Contributing
Put your town on the map
Every place this site lists comes from open map data, mainly OpenStreetMap, the open map anyone can edit. That is deliberate — it is why nobody can buy their way onto a route page. It also means our pages are only as good as the map, and in most Newfoundland towns the map knows the chains and very little else.
One town, measured
In Lewisporte the open map records five places to eat, and all five are chains. The town's own Where to Eat page lists eleven, of which six are independents — and not one of those six is on the map (checked 2026-09-23). Nearly every town on this site has the same gap, which is why a visitor's phone says the only supper in town is a drive-through.
Three measured drives end here — see the route and its map — and the town has its own page of what the map knows about eating here.
You, or somebody you know, runs one of the missing ones?
You don't have to own a place to add it, and you can add your own. Two things the map won't take: anything copied from another map or directory, and marketing words. Name, address, type and phone is a complete entry. Send those four and somebody will map it for you if you would rather not do it yourself.
The one rule that makes it count
Add what you can see from where you are standing, not what you remember. Copying Google Maps, a tourism site or a directory into OpenStreetMap breaks their licence and gets the work reverted.
That sounds like a restriction. It is the whole advantage: you standing on Main Street know things no directory does — which one closed, which one moved, which one the sign spells differently than the internet does.
Use Every Door
It is a free app made for exactly this job — adding shops and eateries by walking past them. It has the categories built in, so you never see a tag, a field name, or anything resembling code. iPhone, Android and F-Droid: every-door.app.
You need a free OpenStreetMap account — an email address and two minutes, at openstreetmap.org. It is the account that puts your name on the work.
The whole job, start to finish
- Park at one end of the main street. Walk it, or drive it slowly.
- Outside a place the map is missing, open Every Door and tap +.
- Pick what it is — Restaurant, Fast Food, Cafe, Pub, Bakery. That one tap is the entire technical part.
- Type the name exactly as the sign spells it — apostrophe and all. "Chelsea's Fish and Chips", not "Chelseas".
- Drag the pin onto the building if it is not already on it.
- Save. The app uploads when you have signal.
A Newfoundland main street is usually fifteen to twenty-five minutes of this, start to finish.
What to leave blank
Opening hours, unless you are reading them off the door right now. A wrong closing time sends somebody to a dark window. This site publishes no hours for that reason.
Leave out reviews and lines like "best fish and chips on the island". The map takes facts; opinions make it arguable.
If it is already there
Confirm it anyway — Every Door has a button for "yes, this still exists", and it stamps today's date on a place nobody has laid eyes on in years. Half of what is wrong with a rural map is not missing places. It is places that closed in 2017.
Nobody has mapped a rental counter at Gander or Deer Lake
The open map records no car rental at Gander and none at Deer Lake, and nine around St. John's. Both airports list their counters on their own pages, but map apps cannot see them. The car rental guide has them, with numbers.
It goes deeper than the counters. Inside the St. John's terminal the map holds sixteen things — cafés, washrooms, a bar, cash machines. Inside Gander's and inside Deer Lake's it holds nothing at all, and Deer Lake's building does not even carry a name.
If you are standing in either arrivals hall with ten minutes to spare, that is the highest-value twenty seconds of mapping available on this island — and it has its own card, written for somebody who works at one of those counters: Twenty seconds at the entrance.
The chip trucks are missing, all of them
The open map has no way of recording one at all. OpenStreetMap has no tag for a mobile food stall, and searching the province by name finds five features that read like one — among them a single Clayton's Chip Truck and something called, simply, "food truck". That is not what Newfoundland looks like in July. Fry huts, chip vans and the trailer that appears behind a pub for the season are a real part of eating here and they are the hardest kind of place for a map to hold.
If one trades from the same spot through a season, it is mappable — Fast Food or Food Court in Every Door, with the name off the van. If it genuinely moves week to week, leave it: a pin that sends somebody to an empty yard is worse than no pin at all, which is the same rule this whole site runs on.
Not only food
The same twenty minutes fixes trailheads, public toilets, picnic tables, fuel, and the slipway everybody local knows about. Those are the things a visitor searches for and does not find.
Do not want to install anything?
Stand outside the place and take a photo of the sign with your phone's location turned on, then send it to us through /contribute. A photo taken on the spot carries where it was taken, which is the part we cannot invent — and it is evidence, which a forwarded list of addresses is not.
Where the map is thin, specifically
Here for one town? The blank spots gives a card, and a link to share, for each town where the map holds nothing to eat at all. The list below also counts towns whose only mapped supper is a drive-through.
Every place this site sends people to, and what OpenStreetMap records within 5 km of it. A nought means nobody has mapped it, not that there is nothing there.
Six of these have not one independent place to eat on the open map — Burgeo, Lewisporte, Cow Head, Marble Mountain Base Lodge, Bay Bulls, Whitbourne. The map has plenty of other things in each of them, so the question was properly asked and the answer is a hole. If you live in one, you are twenty minutes from filling it.
Thirteen of these have almost nothing mapped at all. That's a bigger job: King's Point, Boyd's Cove, Pilley's Island ferry terminal, Pilley's Island, Cape Spear, Notre Dame Junction, Campbellton, Leading Tickles, Burnside ferry terminal, Farewell ferry terminal, Salmonier Nature Park, Mistaken Point Interpretation Centre, Cape St. Mary's Ecological Reserve.
"Everything else mapped" is the check that the question was really asked: shops, schools, fuel, anything with a tag on it in the same radius. A town with plenty of that and no restaurants has a mapping gap. A town with none of it was never measured, and is not listed. Swept 2026-09-11.
What it is worth
It is not work you are doing for us. What you add belongs to the open map, so it turns up in every app and every site built on it — the hiking apps, the car navigation, the booking pages, your town's own site if it ever wants it, and this one. We are simply one of the places it shows up, and the only thing we can give back is to say where every number came from.