How the fork it works
Where the Fork is a group restaurant picker. It ends the forking "where should we eat?" debate by combining everyone's preferences into a single pick — using a mechanism the group agrees on up front.
Creating a session
One person — the creator — picks the location (current GPS or type in a city), the radius, cuisine filters, price range, and the decision mechanism. The app searches nearby restaurants via Google Places and drops a six-character join code.
Joining the group
Everyone else opens the shared link or types the code on the home page. No signup, no account. Drop a display name — you're in.
Selecting acceptable restaurants
The group sees the same restaurant list. Each person taps every spot they'd be happy eating at. You can also suggest a place that is not in the list — suggestions appear for everyone in real time.
Random mechanism
The app picks one restaurant uniformly at random from the ones at least one person found acceptable. Fast, fair, impossible to argue with.
Voting mechanism
Each player gets five votes. Pile all five on one place or spread them across multiple. Most votes wins. Ties broken randomly among the tied restaurants.
Elimination mechanism
Players take turns — in the order they joined — and on each turn one person removes one restaurant from the pool. This continues until only one restaurant remains. That is the winner. Don't act in thirty seconds? Turn auto-skipped — the fork waits for no one.
Ranked Choice mechanism
Each voter ranks their top picks from best to worst. Instant runoff tallies first-choice votes; the lowest-ranked restaurant gets eliminated, and its supporters' next picks flow to the survivors. Rounds repeat until one restaurant clears a majority. No spoilers, no wasted votes.
Combos
Mix and match. The most popular combo is "eliminate down to three, then random" — gives the group some agency in trimming the list, then hands the final pick to chance.