Matcha Scout

How it works

Matcha Scout is a shared, human-written guide to Montréal cafés and restaurants. There are no scraped star ratings here — every entry came from someone texting in a photo and a sentence about a place they liked, and it's kept exactly as they wrote it. Nothing rewrites or summarises what you send.

Adding a spot

Text a photo plus a line about the place to +1 438 901 9530. Anything you'd tell a friend works — the name, roughly where it is, and what it's actually like.

You → 📷 “Café Olimpico in Mile End, big terrasse,
       cash only, best cappuccino in the city”

Us  → Got it, saved as a draft. It goes live in about
       an hour unless you send more.

It's a conversation, not a form. Send the photo first and the words after, or fix something you got wrong, or add three places one after another — it follows along.

You → 📷
Us  → Nice looking room. Which place is it?
You → Kettl, in Mile End. No wifi, tiny.
Us  → Saved. Live in about an hour.
You → actually make that Mile-Ex
Us  → Fixed.

Nothing appears straight away

What you send is saved as a draft, and drafts are private — not on this map, not in search, not linkable. A draft publishes automatically about an hour after your last message, so you always have time to correct it or ask for it to be removed. Say “publish it” and it goes live immediately instead; you'll get one short text when it does.

Text it a question instead

Ask for a recommendation and it searches what other people have added, so you don't have to open this page at all. The guide is small and often has nothing for a given request — when that happens it says so rather than inventing a place.

Reply FORMAT at any time and it will text you these examples back. (HELP is intercepted by the carrier and answered with their own generic text, which is why the keyword is FORMAT.)

Neighbourhoods it recognises

Mention one of these and the note gets pinned to it on the map. Anything else is saved with no location rather than guessed at.

Mile End · Le Plateau · Mile-Ex · Little Italy · Outremont · Parc-Extension · Villeray · Rosemont · Hochelaga · Downtown · Chinatown · Old Montreal · Griffintown · Saint-Henri · Verdun · NDG · Westmount · Mont-Royal

These are approximate — a note pinned to Mile End sits at the middle of Mile End, not at the venue's door. That's why the map labels them with a ~.

Messaging terms

You opt in by texting the number. We only reply to messages you send us.
Message frequency depends on you — typically one reply per message, plus one short confirmation when a draft you sent goes live.
Message & data rates may apply.
Reply STOP at any time to stop. Reply HELP for help. En français : ARRÊT pour arrêter, AIDE pour de l'aide. Texting STOP also deletes any draft of yours that hasn't published yet.
Replies are written by an AI assistant, which reads your message and the photo you send. What you wrote is stored and shown exactly as you wrote it — the assistant decides what to reply, never what your note says.
We store your phone number as a keyed hash. The number itself is kept only while replying, plus up to about two hours if you have a draft waiting, so we can tell you it went live. See the privacy policy.