How to Build a Restaurant Email List for Free

This list is for people who sell to restaurants: food and drink suppliers, software companies, service firms and agencies. If you run a restaurant and want the email addresses of your own diners, this isn't that list.

Every seller starts from the same search and keeps a different slice of it. The table pairs what you sell with the search to run and the rows worth keeping, and finding customers in your own area walks through a first list near you.

One request can collect a whole city's worth of restaurants. Type the number you want, and chat keeps searching until it has them or the area runs out.

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   Step 1: Ask for the number, the city and emails

   Open the side panel, choose Chat and type "Find 200 restaurants in Austin, TX with emails". With a number in the request, chat starts at once instead of asking how many.

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   Step 2: Let it search past the first results

   One Maps search lists about 120 businesses. When that's fewer than you asked for, the panel shows "Searching more of the area" while chat searches in rings 2 km apart around the first results, skipping restaurants it already has.

   • It stops at your number, about 4 km out, or after three searches in a row find nothing new.
   • To go further out, give a distance in the request, such as "within 8 km".
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   Step 3: Read the reply

   Chat says how many restaurants it collected and how many of their websites gave contact details. The cards under the reply offer more of the same search, a nearby town and a related kind of business, as chat's own page describes.

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   Step 4: Open the list to narrow it

   In the side panel's History tab, click View results next to the list. The results page opens, and chat can filter it from there.

The emails come from each restaurant's own website, read during the same run, as the email extractor explains. A restaurant that takes questions only by phone or through a booking form has no address to find, so its Emails cell stays empty.

For a large city, a single request covers the area around its first results. To cover every district, search it neighbourhood by neighbourhood and combine the lists.

The Category column holds the category each restaurant chose for its Maps listing, such as Mexican restaurant, Pizza restaurant or Coffee shop. For most of a restaurant list, that makes it the cuisine column.

To see what a search brought back, open the list and ask chat "count by Category". It answers with the five most common categories and how many others there are; a pivot table in your spreadsheet gives the full count.

Places that serve food under another category may not come back for "restaurants" at all. If you sell to them, search each kind as a request of its own:

• "Cafés in Austin, TX" or "coffee shops in Austin, TX", for coffee and pastry sellers.
• "Bars in Austin, TX" and "breweries in Austin, TX", for beverage and bar supplies.
• "Bakeries in Austin, TX", for flour, packaging and equipment.
• "Food trucks in Austin, TX", for commissary kitchens and mobile payment.

Run them in the same conversation as the first search. A card then offers to combine the searches into one table; a place two searches found is kept once, and the first column, Search, says which search found each one.

Cuisine is the one of the three the list can narrow by, through the Category column. Price and delivery aren't in the row.

• Cuisine: ask chat for "only rows where Category contains Mexican". It matches the word anywhere in the category, in upper or lower case.
• Several cuisines: filters all have to match at once, so keep one cuisine at a time and download each, or search each cuisine as its own request.
• Price: there's no price column, so the extension can't keep only budget or only upscale places.
• Delivery: Maps' service options, such as dine-in, takeout and delivery, aren't collected, so the list can't show which restaurants deliver.

A filter is quick, but it only cuts the list you already have. A search for the cuisine itself, such as "Mexican restaurants in Austin, TX", looks for that cuisine alone, so it can reach places the general search stopped before.

To have both, run the cuisine search in the same conversation and click the combine card. The restaurants the two searches share are kept once, and the reply says how many there were.

A restaurant's Website on Maps can be its own site, a page on an ordering or menu service, a social profile, or nothing. Each one changes what the Emails cell can hold.

Watch out: A run reads each website address once. When several restaurants list pages on the same ordering service as their website, every one of them gets the contact details of the first page read there.

Before you email, look for an address that repeats down the Emails column. Sort the list by Emails on the results page, or ask chat to "remove repeats by Emails" and see how many rows drop, then click Reset the view to bring them back.

Set those rows aside with "only rows where Website does not contain" and the service's name, and call them on the Maps phone instead. Why some cells stay empty covers the other reasons a restaurant has no email.

Three columns do more work on a restaurant list than on most others.

• Operating Hours shows when each restaurant is open, so a sales call or a delivery can avoid service. It's written as Maps shows it, so search it in your spreadsheet rather than sort it.
• Rating and Review Count are numbers in the file. Set Sort businesses to Most reviewed first in Settings → Results, and the most reviewed places head every new list.
• Instagram gets a column of its own when a restaurant's site links to its profile. For a restaurant with no email, that link is another way to reach it.

The bar between two addresses is how a file keeps several emails in one cell. The results page shows the first one with a +N more button.

A list you build holds every restaurant the search finds, as it is on the day you run it. A bought list holds whatever its seller chose, as of the seller's last update.

Note: Emailing restaurants has rules wherever you and they are: read them before you send.