restaurants

Field Trip (Android|iPhone) helps you find out more about your current location by sending you notifications when you're near landmarks, restaurants, historical sites, and other noteworthy spots. The app draws information from several sources, including Arcadia, Historvius, Food Network, Zagat, Atlas Obscura, Daily Secret, and others to enrich your experience of locations you wouldn't know were uniquely interesting otherwise. You can use it as a personal tour guide or share interesting locales over Facebook and Twitter.

The app also lets you set the frequency of notifications from none to an Explore mode that gives you all the … Read more

I was going through the app listings the other day and came across LocalScope, a unique local search tool that helps you find things near your current location. Obviously, many people already use Google Maps (no current version for iOS) for this purpose, and the Yelp-powered Apple Maps gets better every day, but after looking at LocalScope (reviewed below), I went on a search for other apps that tailor their results just for what is right around your area.

This week's collection of apps is all about searching for services around your location. The first gives you tons of listings and a surprising bonus feature for finding your destination. The second offers a slick radial interface and tons of categories to pick from. The third is LocalScope, and uses social data to find places, videos, and images from people around your location.… Read more

Comodo in New York City is serving a heaping side of Instagram along with its swordfish ceviche, seared duck breast, and poblano pepper pasta. The restaurant has decided to embrace all the Instagram users who snap pictures of their food after it's delivered to the table.

Comodo's Instagram menu is gathered together under the #comodomenu hashtag. Currently, 55 user-submitted photos pop up showing the dishes in various lighting conditions. Seeing the photos may help sway your dining decision one way or another. Comodo is expecting customers to make their menu decisions based on dish recommendations from their Instagram friends or from the sheer visual power of the food. … Read more

People know how to upset people.

These days, perhaps the most natural method is to reach for one's laptop and say bad things about those people to all the world.

It is quite some power, one that was exercised to its fullest by one in Ottawa against another.

The first, Elayna Katz, posted two unhappy reviews of the Mambo Nuevo Latino restaurant. The Mambo's owner, Marisol Simoes, didn't react in an entirely sanguine manner.

As the Daily Mail tells it, Simoes decided to publicly besmirch Katz's sexual proclivities.

Why she went this route many might speculate. … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Restaurant offers a 5 percent discount to eat without your phone.

- China is building an army of noodle-making robots.

- Melky Cabrera (SF Giants) created a fake Web site to explain failing drug tests.

- Infrared palm scanners at elementary school are the Mark of the Beast.

- Teenager uses fake ID with picture of Bobby Hill to buy alcohol at six different shops.… Read more

A meal isn't a meal without a cell phone.

You need to photograph the food and get it onto your Twitter feed, before any of the other diners does the same. It isn't called A Twitter "feed" for nothing, you know.

You need to be able to Google "the collected works of Al Green," just in case there's a dispute about who wrote "Let's Stay Together."

And you need it to go on Wine Spectator's site to check just how many points this haughty little Grenache Noir might have earned for its reticence.

Then along comes some upstart restaurant in, of all places, Los Angeles to try and take your iPhone away from you. Worse, this place is prepared to bribe you.… Read more

Besides bad service, too much noise is the biggest complaint people have about eating out, according to reviews site Zagat. And I agree. While a hip, happening place is fun for a single cocktail, it can be maddening, not to mention headache-inducing, when it comes to sustaining a dinner conversation.

Restaurateur John Paluska concurs: "Not being able to carry on a conversation in a restaurant that I was enjoying was really frustrating," he said, adding that it would be a conflicting experience. Even though he liked the place, he wasn't sure he'd want to go back "because I felt exhausted and had a really hard time carrying on a conversation when I was there," he said.

When Paluska decided to open his own restaurant in downtown Berkeley, Calif., designing a chitchat-friendly acoustic environment was one of the top priorities. "More and more restaurants are getting built in spaces that have a lot of hard, reflective surfaces, and there's not a lot of thought put into the sonic environment of the space," he says. … Read more