Urbanspoon Blog

My friend Adam and I recently started Urbanspoon and it seemed like a good idea to have a place to talk about the site, the company, and, most importantly, eating. Thus this blog.

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!