When hunger strikes, one of the best resources a person can have is a smartphone. Using a select few applications, sometimes in combination with GPS, it’s easy to find the best restaurants in a small radius and sort them by price, cuisine, and more. These five applications will help you make hungry indecisiveness a thing of the past.
Yelp
Yelp has been doing ratings and reviews for a considerable chunk of time, predating any smartphone on the market. Users log onto Yelp after checking out a local establishment and give it a rating of between 1 and 5 stars, along with a blurb about the restaurants pros and cons. Additionally, Yelpers (as they’re called) can provide information about parking, cost, and methods of payment. Using the Yelp application on your mobile phone, you can use GPS to find the closest restaurants to you and sort them by rating, price, proximity, and cuisine. After you finish your meal, you can open Yelp again to leave a review of your experience.
Urbanspoon
Urbanspoon Famous for its “slot machine” interface, Urbanspoon features a great way to spice up your dining experience by suggesting a randomly-chosen restaurant for your next adventure. If you’re not into random eats, you can also use the application to sort restaurants by proximity, price, and cuisine. There are also user reviews and the ability to add friends, a la social networking, though these features are not as central to the application as they are with Yelp.
Restaurant Finder
Using your zip code or GPS location, Restaurant Finder will return a list of the closest restaurants along with phone numbers, address information, and even a handy blurb indicating current weather information — just in case it started raining and you’d rather not walk to a highly-recommended pizza place.
Sushipedia
For those who have simply had enough of the traditional pizza or all-American eats, Sushipedia is the perfect application. Not only does this application provide handy sushi information (including what’s in every type of sushi) as well as a weight loss feature that shows the calories of each sushi dish, but it also has the ability to point out every sushi restaurant near you using zip code or GPS location information.
Where to Eat
Some restaurant applications aren’t exactly specific when identifying whether an establishment is a bar, a take-out joint, or a “slow food” sit-down restaurant. This is where “Where to Eat” comes in quite handy, allowing users the ability to sort restaurants according to type — from the slow pace of a sit-down restaurant to the efficiency of the take-out place down the street. With shake-to-shuffle, it also offers up a random dining selection every time you shake your phone. It’s a great way to explore the options around you, courtesy of GPS and a quick shake.
Related :
Liked this post? Got something to say? Share/Comment below. You can also Get Regular Updates. Subscribe to Free RSS Feeds or Email Updates. Follow us on Twitter @madrasgeek and Like us on Facebook.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
This is a good round up post Jane!
I’m going to put a shameless plug here. For India, we guys at Zomato.com have released an android app and I’d love your comments/criticisms on it. You can access it currently through wap by typing in m.zomato.com