Getting started

Hi.

We’ve just gotten Urbanspoon off the ground, and it seems like a good idea to have a place to talk about the site, the company, and, most importantly, eating. Thus this blog. If you have questions about any of those things, please don’t hesitate to ask!

The idea behind Urbanspoon is to make a truly simple restaurant search site. Most often when we use the web to get info about a restaurant we want the phone number, the location and the menu. Most of us don’t have time or inclination to maintain a food blog, but we do have opinions and recommendations that we share with our friends. Urbanspoon should help with that.

Apart from the basics, here are a few distinct features:

1. Restaurant menus – I always have a hard time finding these. So we want to show either a link if the restaurant already has a menu online, or show a scanned menu if they don’t.
2. Reviews from the critics – we want to offer people a range of opinions in one place. We’re currently looking at sites like the Times, the PI and the Stranger. We also want other people with strong opinions – either on Urbanspoon.com or on their own blogs – to chime in on restaurants, and let the best reviews rise to the top.
3. Voting – we have a simple up/down voting scheme to measure the popularity of restaurants in town. We wanted something totally transparent, like Rotten Tomatoes but for restaurants.
4. Personal restaurant lists – people can create and share lists of their favorite restaurants and their own commentary on those restaurants. The idea is that most people don’t take the time to write a whole blog about food, but everyone can share their favorites.

I hope you like it – we can’t wait to hear what you have to say. And to see where people are eating!