Andreea, founder of Dinesotto, tells us what restaurant reviews are missing (BSL)

Almost everything social seems to happen around food. We meet friends for dinner, go on dates, celebrate birthdays, catch up with colleagues and meet new people over a meal. And yet there is one piece of information that almost no restaurant review ever gives you: what it actually sounds like to sit there.

My name is Andreea. I am a frontend developer living in London, and I have sensorineural hearing loss. For years I accepted that eating out would often be difficult, arriving somewhere that looked perfect on paper only to spend the evening working hard just to follow the conversation.

What frustrated me most was that there was no way of knowing beforehand. So I built Dinesotto.

Sound has rarely been treated as part of restaurant accessibility. We check menus, prices, opening hours and whether somewhere is wheelchair accessible. We read hundreds of words about the food and the atmosphere.

But whether you will actually be able to hear the person sitting opposite you is almost never mentioned. For a huge number of people, that information matters more than anything else on the page.

Once I started asking, I realised how many people were quietly adapting their social lives around this problem without anyone really talking about it.

I heard from people who are Deaf and hard of hearing, from people with tinnitus, ADHD, autism and sensory sensitivities. Some had stopped going to certain restaurants. Others had started avoiding social situations altogether because they already knew how difficult the environment would be.

People told me that knowing this information in advance would have changed decisions they had already made, restaurants they avoided, occasions they missed, evenings they left early.

But I also heard from people with no particular hearing or sensory condition who said they had started noticing the same thing. After a day surrounded by noise from work, traffic and public transport, they wanted somewhere they could actually hear the people they were with.

They had never framed it as an accessibility issue. They just knew something was missing.

I had not expected that. I thought I was building something for people like me. It turned out I was building something for anyone who has ever left a restaurant feeling more drained than when they arrived.

Dinesotto works by letting people contribute their experience of a restaurant across a few simple factors: how loud it is overall, whether the music competes with conversation, how close the tables are and how the atmosphere changes at different times of day.

The same restaurant can feel completely different at lunch on a Tuesday compared to dinner on a Friday night, and that kind of detail matters when you are trying to make an informed choice. There are no paid listings and no login required. Anyone can search, and anyone can contribute.

Dinesotto currently covers London, but the plan is to expand across the UK and eventually include other types of venues where people meet and socialise, from cafés and bars to event spaces.

I do not think every restaurant needs to be quiet. I just think sound should be part of how we describe a dining experience, in the same way we describe the food or the service or the price.

Not because restaurants need to change, but because people deserve enough information to make their own choice about where they go.

You can explore the directory or contribute your own experience at dinesotto.com.