restaurant

Are you ready to try another recommender app? Even if you've been burned by less-than-stellar automatic recommendations in the past, free restaurant recommender app Ness is worth a shot. The iOS app, from Silicon Valley startup Ness Computing, boasts serious technology put together by an impressive team of engineers, all in the service of giving you tips on where to grab a bite.

Ness learns over time and builds a "taste profile" of you. The more it learns, the better the recommendations, a la Pandora. Facebook and Foursquare recommendations and check-ins from friends all show up on the Ness search results page.

The app makes recommendations by crunching together your taste profile, your similarity to other people, recommendations from friends, and overall popularity ratings.

The company's Likeness Engine gives you a Likeness Score from 0 to 100 for each restaurant. I'm glad they're producing fine-grained ratings. Five stars, even with half stars, have never felt adequate.

You can also filter the results. Choose "Hide Places I've Rated" to make sure new restaurants show up at the top of your search results. And choose "No Big Chains" to stick to local businesses. Of course, if you and your friends are foodies, the chains shouldn't show up in your search results anyway, right?… Read more

A few questions, if we may. Have you ever worked in a restaurant? Have you ever started your own business? Have you ever used a point-of-sale system? How about all three at once? Welcome to the world of the restaurant entrepreneur, a high-stress, low-overhead, labor-intensive undertaking similar to other challenging occupations such as barkeeper or cafe owner. For them, Sani Technologies offers Easy Restaurant POS, a point-of-sale system optimized for restaurants, bars, grills, pizzerias, and similar small businesses. It supports dine-in, take-out, and delivery services; multiple users; separate Kitchen Display like large chains; and bars and beverage services. It tracks … Read more

When large egos meets instant criticism, sparks tend to fly in real time.

So it proved in a Houston restaurant the other night when the management took exception to a customer's socially networked opinion.

The Houston Press was the first to digest what happened. It seems that Allison Hiromi was having drinks at a place called Down House--perhaps not the cheeriest name for a restaurant.

She overheard a conversation in which a bartender said something none too flattering about another Houston bar-owner.

The culinary world in Houston--with which I have some small familiarity--is at least as touchy as it … Read more

Restaurant blogging has many nuances.

You can try, in general, to be constructive, like The Tablehopper. You can try to be artistically idiosyncratic like Orangette or From Lips to Fingers. Or you can decide to make chefs quake in their clogs like Frenchman Francois Simon who once said: "I start judging the minute I come in."

Perhaps that is the set of mind and soul espoused by a Taiwanese blogger (last name Liu) who wandered into a Taichung beef noodle restaurant. If so, it's an attitude that has reportedly landed her her in jail.

You see, the … 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

Scoutmob is a location-aware coupon service that pushes local restaurant and retail deals directly to your mobile device. No need to print or purchase anything, just scroll through the local 50 percent off (and more) coupons available, click "USE THE DEAL," and flash your screen at the location. It's like Groupon, only simpler and better.

What gives Scoutmob its edge over its other deal-serving competitors is that there's no need to purchase anything ahead of time. If your GPS-enabled mobile device detects that you are at the deal location, you get the deal. And most deals … Read more

TVFoodMaps for Android is essentially a GPS guided tour of all the restaurants featured on your favorite Food Network and Travel Channel shows. For self-proclaimed food enthusiasts, it is a veritable treasure trove of eating advice.

Launch TVFoodMaps, enable GPS, and watch the app immediately get to work searching for notable restaurants in your vicinity. Then choose to view results in either a map view or a list view, which notes distance from your location as well as the titles of the shows that featured each restaurant. Click on an item to see additional details, including the name of the … Read more

Today we're talking about one my favorite topics: food. Dining out, to be precise. I wrote a story in December about how at least one San Francisco restaurant owner, Mark Pastore of Incanto, had problems with OpenTable, the restaurant reservation service. I thought it was an interesting snapshot of what the Web has done time and again: upset and upend well-established business models, sometimes with unexpected and negative side effects that go along with the numerous upsides.

There are several companies affecting the restaurant business. OpenTable radically changed the way restaurants fill their seats. Yelp changed how people get reviews of restaurants, effectively killing Zagat's lock on the mobile guidebook market. Modern Web 2.0 and mobile darlings like Groupon and Foursquare are continuing to change what people pay for dining out and how they find out about restaurants.

There are lessons to be learned here that affect all small and local businesses, and that's what we are discussing today, with two guests intimately familiar with these issues.

First up, Incanto's Mark Pastore. Mark is a well-known and unconventional restaurateur and stands out in San Francisco, where it's hard for any dining establishment to get noticed. (He also owns Boccalone.)

Also joining us: John Li, co-founder of Menuism.com, a local Web start-up for reviewing restaurants and dishes. John and his team are in the middle of "dining meets Web space" and trying to break into the big leagues, and he can tell us what that's like.

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Some of our discussion points… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--With the restaurant rating and recommendation business being pretty well locked up (by Yelp, OpenTable, Foursquare, etc.), the new game in town is apparently recommendations on individual dishes. Got a hankering for tom kha gai soup? You can check out Spork (live) or TopDish (invite-only beta) to find the best restaurant nearby that serves that particular dish; both companies are presenting in the low-rent "launch pad" sideshow of the Launch conference here.

These two services collect user reviews--ratings and pictures--of dishes to help you make the life-critical decision of where to find the best of whatever you're looking for, or if you're sitting at a restaurant, which dish to order. Both sites let you profile your tastes to help decide for you what you're more likely to like.

Spork is a bit more social at the moment. It connects to your Facebook network to prioritize food ratings from your friends. An upcoming feature will let you gift a dish to a friend via a PayPal credit for the cost of the dish. A future network update may work the credit through restaurants directly.

Co-founder Dan Cheung told me he's also considering adding a "reverse Groupon" feature to the service: If enough users like a restaurant's dish, Spork may ask the restaurant to create a coupon for it, to stimulate demand just a little bit more.

TopDish is a bit newer, still in closed beta. Its recommendations are network-wide, for the time being, and the mobile app isn't out yet. The model is largely the same as Spork's, but co-founder Salil Pandit told me his service's secret sauce will be communication with restaurants: If you run an eatery, you'll be able to see how all your individual dishes rate. This will be a free service for a while, although the value to a restaurant could obviously be quite high. "We just want to help start a conversation," Pandit told me.

The increasing granularity of data in new Web services is an important trend to watch. Highly-specific recommendation databases don't work unless there's enough volume of users and data feeding into them. Without that, you get a lot of empty records and unsatisfied users. But with everyone getting with the program of recommending things to friends, checking in, and Tweeting or Facebooking their every move, it's not surprising that companies like these (and some others, launching tomorrow at this conference) are tying to make sense of these little tidbits of opinion.

… Read more