Effective date: 22 September 2026
This Privacy Policy explains what personal information this website (including the London Food Hubs restaurant discovery service and the wider SmartServeUK platform it runs on) collects, why, and what choices you have. It describes our actual, currently implemented data practices — it does not describe features that do not exist yet (for example, this Service does not currently process online orders, payments, or deliveries, and does not run any advertising or analytics tracking).
This is a practical, plain-English description of our data practices, not a certification of legal compliance and not a substitute for formal legal advice.
This website is operated by MBN Continental (UK) Ltd. Our business/contact address is 85 Halley Road, London E7 8DS, United Kingdom. The named contact for this Service is Md. Mahtab Hossain Siddiqui. “SmartServeUK” and “London Food Hubs” are brand names used on this website by the same operator. In this policy, “we”, “us” and “the Service” refer to that operator and this website.
We collect different categories of information depending on how you use the Service. We only describe below what is actually collected by the features that exist today.
If you create an account, we collect your full name, email address, an optional phone number, and the account role you sign up as (for example, customer, restaurant, caterer, supplier, or household). Account creation and sign-in are handled by Firebase Authentication — see “Third-party service providers” below.
If you submit a claim to be recognised as the owner or authorised representative of a restaurant listing, we collect your name, a business contact email, and — if you choose to provide them — a role/title, a contact phone number, and a free-text note to help us verify the claim. This information is stored in a private record that is never included in the public restaurant listing and is only accessible to you (the person who submitted the claim) and to platform administrators reviewing claims. It is not shown to other visitors, other restaurant owners, or search engines.
If you manage a restaurant listing, we store the business information you provide for that listing — for example the restaurant's name, description, menu, cuisine, address, opening hours, contact details, images, and social/website links. This information is business/public-facing information about the restaurant, intended to be displayed publicly on the Service, and is treated differently from the private claimant information above.
If you submit a review, we store your display name, your star ratings, your review text and the date of your visit, linked to your account. Every review goes through a moderation step before it is shown publicly: it stays pending until an administrator approves or rejects it, and a published review can later be removed from public view. Your display name, ratings, review text and visit date may be shown publicly if the review is approved. The stored review record also carries an internal account identifier and the time it was last moderated (and, on some older reviews, internal moderation details); the website does not display these, but approved review records are readable by the public through our database, so they should not be treated as hidden. The administrator who moderated a newer review is recorded only in a private record. A restaurant's verified owner may publish one public response to an approved review of their restaurant; the response text is shown publicly and the owner's account identifier is stored with it. Moderator notes are kept privately and are not shown publicly.
To help us check that a review is genuine, we ask reviewers for a mobile telephone number, their consent to be contacted about the review, the date of the visit, and an approximate one-hour time window for the visit. For a review of a restaurant that is not yet listed on the Service we also ask for the restaurant's name and address details and for proof of the visit or purchase (for example a receipt or order confirmation, uploaded as an image or PDF file). We may telephone the reviewer to verify their visit or review. We keep a record of the outcome of any telephone check, of an administrator's assessment of any proof of visit, and our internal moderation notes.
This verification information is stored separately from the public review, is not intended for public display, is not shown to the restaurant being reviewed, and is accessible only to platform administrators. Proof-of-visit files are stored using Firebase Storage, are viewable only by administrators, and cannot be read back by the person who uploaded them. Any restaurant details you submit for an unlisted restaurant are also readable by you and by administrators. A verification badge shown on a review reports only the outcome of one specific step (that an administrator recorded the proof of visit as verified, or that a telephone check was completed); it does not reveal the underlying information. Please hide anything you do not need to show, and never upload an image showing a full payment card number.
If you report or challenge a published review, we store the review it concerns, your account identifier, whether you reported as a restaurant owner or as an ordinary customer, the reason you chose and any short explanation you wrote. Reports are private: they are readable only by administrators and are not shown to the reviewer, to the restaurant or to the public. Reporting a review does not by itself remove it.
If you submit a correction request (flagging that something about a listing is wrong) or a removal request (asking for a listing to be taken down), we store your account identifier, an optional contact email, and the free-text details you provide, together with the outcome of our review. This is used only to process your request and is not shown publicly.
If, as a restaurant owner, you request that your own listing content be translated into another supported language, we record that request against your account and the restaurant it relates to, so it can be tracked and actioned. We do not currently process any payment for this — see “Translations” in our Terms.
If a restaurant applies to join the platform through our onboarding signup form, we collect the information submitted on that form — typically a business name, an owner/contact name, a phone number, an email address, the cuisines offered, and any notes supplied — so that we can review and process the application.
Where an administrator takes an action that affects your account, a listing, a claim, a review, a review report, or a request (for example, approving a claim, verifying a review or moderating a review), we keep a basic record of that action — such as which administrator account acted, when, and any moderation note — for accountability and audit purposes. The website does not display this information (see “Reviews and other content you submit” above for what an approved review record contains).
Our sign-in system (Firebase Authentication) uses your browser's local storage to keep you signed in between visits. This is strictly necessary for the account features to work and is not used for advertising or analytics. We do not currently run any analytics, advertising, or third-party tracking on this website — see our Cookie Policy for full detail.
We use the following infrastructure providers to run this Service. They process information on our behalf as part of providing that infrastructure — we do not sell your information to them or to anyone else, and we do not use them for advertising.
As Firebase/Google Cloud is a global infrastructure provider, your information may be stored or processed in data centres outside the United Kingdom. We have not made any additional claims about specific international-transfer safeguards beyond what Google itself publishes, and we will update this section if that changes.
We keep account, listing, claim, review, and request information for as long as it is needed to provide the Service — broadly, for as long as your account or a related listing/claim/request stays active, and for a reasonable further period afterwards for administrative, security, or record-keeping reasons. We have not yet finalised fixed retention periods for every category of information listed above; this policy will be updated once specific retention periods are confirmed, rather than us stating a number we cannot yet stand behind. This applies equally to the review-related information described above — including published, rejected and removed reviews, mobile numbers and contact-consent records, visit details, proof-of-visit files, telephone-check outcomes, moderation notes, review reports, and details submitted for restaurants not yet listed.
We restrict access to private information (such as restaurant claim details) using database access-control rules, so that only the person who submitted it and platform administrators can read it — it is never included in the public restaurant listing. Private review verification information (mobile numbers, consent records, visit windows, telephone-check outcomes and proof-of-visit files) is restricted to platform administrators in the same way. No method of storing or transmitting information is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or request a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and to object to or restrict some of our processing. In practice:
These requests are currently reviewed and actioned manually by our team rather than through an automated self-service system, so please allow us a reasonable amount of time to respond.
This Service is intended for general audience use in connection with discovering restaurants in London. It is not directed at young children, and we do not currently operate any age-verification mechanism.
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time as the Service changes. If we make a material change, we will update the effective date at the top of this page.
This policy is currently published in English only, which is its authoritative version. Although the rest of this website is available in English, Bengali, Arabic, and French, a translated version of this policy is not yet available. If you need this information in another language, please contact us using the details above.