urbanspoon

Services like Yelp and Urbanspoon are helpful when seeking a place to eat, but can sometimes overwhelm you with options. Additionally, you'll probably find comments that are unrealistic (possibly from an owner), and others written by people who simply can't be pleased mixed throughout any solid feedback.

Instead of trying to decode the truth, why not make a map that only you and your friends can edit and comment on? Here's how to get started:

Step 1: Head over to Google Maps in your Web … Read more

Urbanspoon is a location-aware mobile app that helps the indecisive among us figure out where to eat. Open it up, and the Home screen presents you with a number of ways to receive restaurant recommendations or to simply search for a restaurant in your vicinity. You can Browse via category, see what's Nearby, or look at your Friends' profiles. There's also a built-in tool for booking reservations. If you're more into visual stimulation, the bottom of the Home screen displays a virtually endless slide show of photos from restaurants nearby. Swipe through them, find one you like, … Read more

Curious diners have a new friend in Urbanspoon, a practical dining discovery app that shows a playful side when you let it. Otherwise, it gets to the serious business of finding you food. GPS or various forms of manual input shine a light on the restaurants nearby. While there's also browsing by popularity or neighborhood or searching by name, the most interesting and invigorating feature is the slot machine on the main screen. Enthusiastically shake the iPhone (or press "shake") to set individual wheels in motion. They'll randomly land on a nearby neighborhood, cuisine, and price … Read more

In this day and age when every other person is a self-described foodie, finding the best mobile application to point you to a taste bud-bending experience requires as much discernment as finding the authentic voice from among throngs of folks who think they know good eats.

I'd be lying if I didn't claim snobby epicurean tendencies, myself.

This headstrong belief in one's own taste credentials is exactly what fuels the need for informative and well-designed food-finding applications. Too simple and a foodie will shun it. Too esoteric and it could alienate a growing segment of people who really care about the art and science of meal-making.

I've recently studied several restaurant-recommending applications for iPhone and other mobile platforms, including Yelp and Urbanspoon for iPhone and Zagat To Go for Windows Mobile, Palm, and BlackBerry, and wondered how relative newcomers Munch ($0.99) and LocalEats ($0.99) compare to these more established services.

There are, of course, things to laud and criticize with each app. Munch's interface has a great method for quick-launching searches for pizza, Mexican, and so on from icons in the screen navigation. You can select other cuisines from a scrolling list. Munch returns wonderfully accurate search results, but is devoid of context. There are no reviews, no Web site listings, and every restaurant we looked at was rated with five empty stars. That's doable if you want a listings app, but for anyone trying to make intelligent choices, it just won't work.

LocalEats fares much better. The app brings you the best 100 (or more) restaurants in 50 U.S. cities as determined by a team of foodie professionals, authors of the online dining guide Where the locals eat. The benefit is that unlike Urbanspoon, no national chain even thinks of making an appearance. You can search each city's highest-rated establishments by alphabetical order, cuisine type, or the best of each category. For larger cities you can also search by neighborhood.… Read more

There are just three simple instructions for finding local restaurants with Urbanspoon for iPhone and iPod Touch, an application developed by the makers of Urbanspoon.com:

Step 1: If you're one the iPhone, let the app use GPS to pinpoint your location. If you're on the iPod Touch, tap the button to enter your city.

Step 2: Vigorously shake the device up and down like you would a blocked-up ketchup bottle. Or simply press the "shake" button.

Step 3: Watch the application's slot machine wheels spin as Urbanspoon settles on a cuisine, price range, and … Read more

For those of us who have a hard time deciding what to eat or where to dine out, Urbanspoon has made a slot machine/roulette application (complete with 'pull' slot machine sound effects) to help us make a decision on where to eat. The application will determine your location from the GPS feature (which is still a pretty marked and powerful feature to the iPhone 3G that invariably raises privacy issues) and you can select he criteria you want, i.e., neighborhood, cuisine and price. And, for some inexplicable reason, you literally shake the phone to activate the selection feature. … Read more