Restaurant and recipe recommendations were once the province of iconic (yet shadowy) critics like
Mimi Sheraton. But along came Zagat, and then Yelp, and what was once a field dictated by experts is now a
relative buffet of culinary insights and opinions offered up by amateur foodies. Several new online services are extending that noble mission: to let home cooks educate each other while advancing discourse about food and rewarding users with personal exposure. Now, everyone’s a critic, and it’s never tasted better.
Foodspotting: Foodspotting just celebrated its one-year anniversary, but it already has 550,000 iPhone users eating out of the palm of its hand. The platform, founded in San Francisco, is a global database of user-uploaded food photos cross-referenced by restaurant, location and dish name. Users can stand on any street corner and open up the app (available for the
iPhone and in beta on
Android) to immediately
discover the most highly rated “spots” in the area. In founder Alexa Andrzejewski’s words, “It’s like “
Pandora for food.” Having already acquired
Eat.ly, scored partners like Zagat, The Travel Channel and Tasting Table, and received
$3.75 million in initial funding, Foodspotting seems well poised to lead the way in democratizing dining, one picture at a time.
Dinevore: “Don’t they say the best way to a friend’s stomach is through the Internet?” asks
Dinevore’s tagline. With a
mission to amass and distill highly relevant and refined advice to diners, this new personalized guide renders that question more than merely rhetorical. Dinevore users create lists of their favorite restaurants and then curate suggestions by “following” users they trust, as with other familiar social networks. But, here, each restaurant is given an averaged 1-100 “dinescore” generated by user recommendations combined with meta-scored reviews from professional critics. Users can then add venues to their “want to eat here” to-do lists or customize their own lists. One doesn’t even have to leave the site to make a reservation—it links straight to
OpenTable.
Foodily: Most people have a
favorite website for recipe searching, but this new one-stop shop takes targeted content aggregation to a new level. Launched by a team of Yahoo veterans who
raised $5 million in its first investment round last year,
Foodily lets users browse the largest recipe archive online, compiled from well-loved chefs, as well as small-fry food bloggers, in a pared-down
magazine-like environment. Besides boasting a decidedly clean and agreeable interface, the site allows users to refine their searches to exclude a certain ingredient (like dreaded salt, or perhaps nuts for those with allergic aversions) and “like” certain dishes to integrate automatically into their Facebook feeds. Features like these give meaning to the idea of “social gastronomy.”
