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CTA RATING: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

If you’re at all like me, you get bored of the same old restaurants but don’t want to spend hours looking through the phonebook (who does that any more?) to find a new place that sounds good.  Even if you do that, there’s always the risk that you won’t enjoy the food or the ambiance.  Yes, there are websites that can help with this: most major metropolitan areas have several places where you can go to find new stuff and see what gets great ratings. Well guess what… that ability and more is now available to those of us with an iPhone or even an iPod Touch.  More after the break…

Urbanspoon exists to fill the void between us and the best food in town.  It starts off by grabbing your core location and searches a database of restaurants near you so you can find exactly what you want for dinner or even something you didn’t know existed.  In the shake menu, you have 3 columns.  The first column shows you the available cities near you, the next column selects the type of food you want, and the third column is basically a money gauge–it lets you select restaurants from cheap to very pricey.  One of the best features this app has going for it is the shake function–it’s a clever use of the accelerometer in a way you would never expect.  If you shake the iPhone, the columns will spin like a slot machine and choose a restaurant for you.  You can go with the first restaurant or keep shaking until you find something that sounds good to all of the people in your party.  If you want to stay within a certain category–city, cuisine, price–you can lock it and shake to randomly select the other one or two categories.  It works wonderfully and has helped me find several restaurants in my area that I didn’t even know existed.

The next function is the Browse menu where you can just look through the restaurants that are popular on Urbanspoon in your area.  If you have an Urbanspoon account already, you can rate the restaurants in your area.  If not, you can create an account right from the application so you can get in on the rating frenzy.  You can also read reviews from other users and make your decision from there.  Lastly, you can select the city you’ll be in for dinner and make plans based on that information.

Search is just that: it allows you to search for a restaurant in the area.  The next one is pretty handy… It’s called Near Me which again uses your core location to find restaurants within a mile and a half from you.  From what I’ve seen, it works really well and has shown me several restaurants that I didn’t even know existed within two miles of my house.  Your mileage may vary because I live in a big city, and there’s quite a bit of activity on Urbanspoon itself.  I’ve read reports of this being worthless in smaller cities because there’s no one rating restaurants, or the Urbanspoon database doesn’t support it.

With all of that said, we really enjoy this app and have used it many times since we downloaded it a week ago.  Here are a few things that we would like to see in the next revision of this app:

 

  • Bug fixes – this seems to be a common occurrence with 1.0 applications so we won’t ding it too much.  For example, if you tell Urbanspoon that a restaurant doesn’t exist, you can’t get out of the browse menu to go to the near me menu without quitting.  Not a big deal, just annoying.
  • New Rating System – We’d really like to see a star rating system instead of yes/no.  It seems like we would get a more accurate restaurant rating from that versus yes/no.  I would even appreciate a little more flexibility: I don’t want to say I like a restaurant if it’s only okay, but I wouldn’t want to say it was bad either.
  • Updated Database — We’ve found a couple of restaurants in the database that have been closed for more than a year.  I could see this being an issue if people are new to an area and using this app as a reliable source.  It would definitely be good to call each restaurant to make sure it’s really there.