The best sites and iPhone apps for finding restaurants

Posted by: Dean Foust on July 7, 2009

One of the saving graces of business travel—which otherwise has all the romance these days of taking the Greyhouse bus cross country—is the chance to try out the local cuisines in the cities you visit. I asked my summer intern, Shalini Ramachandran, to research the best iPhone apps and web sites for travelers in search of the best local restaurants.
Shalini researched four popular restaurant apps and their corresponding websites: Urbanspoon, Yelp, LocalEats and Zagat. First up, a look at the mobile apps of each service (which are, for now, only available for the iPhone), ranked from worst to first. The best: Yelp’s iPhone app and UrbanSpoon’s web site:



Zagat to Go ’09 2 peppers
Cost: $10, from the iPhone App Store
I was pretty excited to see what cool features this expensive ($10) iPhone app would have, but I was quite disappointed. I’m a vegetarian, and the first thing I look at is how well an app understands and searches for specific dietary restrictions (i.e., vegetarian, organic). However, when I typed “vegetarian” into the search bar, Zagat only found the restaurants that are purely vegetarian…while I just wanted places with a vegetarian option. So according to Zagat, I could only eat at about seven restaurants in Atlanta (!).
Second, the rating system is confusing. Instead of using a conventional rating system—stars or somesuch—the Zagat app gives a numerical grade for food, decor and service but doesn’t say what each number means. I looked up my favorite Indian restaurant in Atlanta, Madras Saravana Bhavan, and I found on the search screen “Food: 24, Decor: 12, Service: 15, Cost: $15.” When I tried to find the rating system on the app, I couldn’t find a help page. I had no idea what “24” or “12” meant, and I couldn’t find out with a cursory browse through the app. I also didn’t know whether the cost was for the average or the most expensive item on the menu.
But the biggest quibble I have against Zagat is that you can’t find “lesser” dining places. When you’re on a business trip, sure, you’ll want nicer restaurants where you can take clients. But using Zagat, you wouldn’t be able to find the nearest Moe’s if you’re late to a meeting.
There are some nice features on Zagat: I really liked the Neighborhoods section, which filters restaurants by such characteristics as “Warm Welcome” and “Teen/Tween Appeal,” etc. Zagat’s survey is pretty comprehensive, too, since it’s based on “over 350,000 surveyors,” according to its website. Bottom line though? Save the 10 bucks and go to a movie instead.
LocalEats 3 peppers
Cost: 99 cents from the iPhone App Store
This app was difficult to compare since it works differently: Rather than helping you find all the restaurants close by, it simply rates the Top 100 restaurants in a city and gives superlatives to other eateries (in Atlanta, it tags the Varsity as serving the “Best Hotdog.”)
On one hand, this app can be useful for a business traveler who wants to find the best restaurants at a glance. I’m always interested in the best Ethiopian and best Thai restaurants in cities, so this app would be worth the 99 cents to me. It’s a pretty easy app to interact with. Plus, wherever LocalEats will take you, you know it’s going to be good…or at least critic-approved.
However, when I tried to see how it determines the best restaurants, I came to a page that told me (very pompously) that Local Eats does not use any user-generated content because users favor “deep-fried-cheese” and “Olive Garden.” (I was slightly offended because I like Olive Garden). Basically, there’s no way to tell how Local Eats comes up with its ratings—is it ambience, service, dining, and/or cost? LocalEats says it relies on the consensus of unnamed restaurant critics, and while some of its Top 100 in Atlanta are in my view deserving (like Madras Saravana Bhavan), some others aren’t (like Haveli, another Indian restaurant which I felt was overpriced and not worth the hype).
Urbanspoon Four peppers
Cost: free from the iPhone App Store.
It’s hard to dislike Urbanspoon’s app, which makes use of the iPhone’s ability to sense when it’s being shaken or flipped. Urbanspoon uses three virtual rolling bars—much like a slot machine—where you can pick a price range, area, and a category like “Mexican,” “buffett” or even “hot dog”—and then you shake! That prompts the app to randomly select a restaurant near you that meets your criteria. When I searched for an upscale Chinese restaurant in Atlanta, I locked in “Chinese” and “$$$”, shook the phone, and Urbanspoon recommended Hong Kong Harbour on Cheshire Bridge. (If you don’t want the random filter, or you simply want to read reviews, you can instead go to the browse or search page, where you can manually find the restaurant you want.)
Another thing I love about Urbanspoon is its huuuuge database of restaurants, from the Waffle Houses to the five-star joints. The flip side is that Urbanspoon’s content is all user-generated. I know I griped about LocalEats being too elitist, but Urbanspoon might be too democratic sometimes—and the ratings for some well-known restaurants might be based on the ratings of just 20 users. So it could be hard to know whether a highly rated restaurant is fancy enough for a meal with the CEO.
Also, the search feature only allows you to sort restaurants by distance, name and popularity--not by cost, availability, service or other features the pricier apps tend to have. But the bottom line: it’s free, it’s extensive and it’s cool—if nothing else, your kids will enjoy the “shake” feature.
Yelp Five peppers
Cost: free from the iPhone App Store.
I saved my top pick for last. Yelp has all the user-friendliness of Urbanspoon, but with better search filters. It’s simple, the rating system is clear, and Yelp has a huge database that allows you to look for both Mom and Pop diners as well as white tablecloth restaurants.
The search feature allows you to sort restaurants based on cost, proximity, and availability (with a button listing which restaurants are “Open Now”). So while Zagat only considers top-shelf restaurants, Yelp allows users to choose if they want that filter or not.
Restaurants are rated on a simple five-star system (thank goodness) but the ratings are all user-generated. For larger restaurants, Yelp excerpts reviews from local publications (such as Creative Loafing in Atlanta), but only provides user reviews for smaller establishments. I can forgive that though, because the user reviews on Yelp tend to be helpful.
One feature I love on Yelp’s app is the button that provides directions to each restaurant. The link takes you to Google Maps, which provides driving directions based on your GPS signal. (No other app offers directions—other simply provide a map.) Yelp also has a cool “feed” feature where you can see the latest user-generated content. So if you’re feeling adventurous, you can try out “Julie W.’s” top Indonesian food pick, posted 11 minutes ago.
The only feature I can think of that’s noticeably missing from Yelp is LocalEats’ Top 100 ratings and “Best” picks…and, I suppose, the expert reviews. Here’s my recommendation: download Yelp (since it’s free), and see if you can find what you’re looking for. If you don’t trust Yelp’s users, spend the 99 cents and get the expert picks from LocalEats too.
Now on to the websites. Generally speaking, I feel that a website should have much richer information than its corresponding app. I've rated the websites of the aforementioned apps based on how much better they are than their mobile versions—and ranked them here, worst to first:
Yelp Three peppers
Although I rated Yelp as the best iPhone app, its website was a disappointment. Yelp looks like a search engine rather than a friendly restaurant finder--it has a bunch of random links and not much structure. The user interface is a bit weak, because it takes you a while to find where to find your city and look for different types of cuisines. There's no easy way for you to just browse restaurants in, say, Lilburn, Ga. I had to click to three different pages before I could do that (and the less clicking, the better). However, Yelp’s vast database remains noteworthy.
LocalEats Three peppers
I don't like how the LocalEats website is basically the same thing as the app—which is nothing special in the first place. I'd recommend that people traveling to a new city just go online for the LocalEats' top picks, rather than download the 99 cent iPhone app. However, LocalEats.com’s blogs are well-written and entertaining, with topics like the best tips for drinking tequila (which may or may not be helpful on a business trip). But as with Yelp, the LocalEats website doesn’t recognize the city from which you’re accessing the site—you have to find your city before you can begin searching.

Zagat Four peppers
Zagat’s website also doesn't recognize the city from which you are accessing the site, but I did enjoy its discussion boards enough look past that. The different boards, like "Top Ten Dining Experiences" and "Favorite Donut Spots," were pretty accurate and well-written. Otherwise, the Zagat website suffers from the same problem as its app: its database is too small. However, I do give Zagat.com credit for providing an easy interface as well as lots of extra features by which to review restaurants, like the discussion boards.

Urbanspoon Four peppers
I give Urbanspoon.com four peppers just because it’s so user-friendly, with clearly accessible links to neighborhoods and types of cuisines, as well as "Best Fine Dining" and “Talk of the Town” lists on the homepage. Urbanspoon.com also encompasses a wider range of information than its app, including different strata of reviews (critics, blogs, then users) on the right side of the homepage. My one quibble is that none of the blogs or reviews are generated by Urbanspoon; rather, the reviews are from publications, and the blogs are outside sources that may or may not be reliable. However, I was so pleased that Urbanspoon.com recognized that I was accessing it from Atlanta (and opened the homepage to Atlanta dining) that I could definitely overlook that flaw.
Major lesson learned: a good iPhone app does not mean a good website, and vice versa.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/travelers_check/archives/2009/07/the_best_sites_and_iphone_apps_for_finding_restaurants.html