Urbanspoon For iPhone

Icon for Urbanspoon's iPhone App.

I am sure that most of you have noticed the badge at the end of my restaurant reviews here on the blog with a link to Urbanspoon.com. One of the first applications I downloaded from the iPhone App Store the first weekend that the store was open, was the one for Urbanspoon. I was intrigued by one feature in particular that it had that set it apart all restaurant finders you see on other phones — like LiveSearch, which we used on our regrettable Blackjacks — in that after the iPhone has determined your location, you could shake the iPhone and it would randomly pick a restaurant in your immediate area. Neat, huh?

Urbanspoon’s website has restaurant listings for most of the larger cities in the United States (about 50, so far) as well Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver in Canada, Melbourne and Sydney in Australia and London. These listing are added by the site’s users with reviews by local newspapers, bloggers and the users themselves and include pertinent information, such as what fare the restaurant serves, links to menus (if available), maps and phone numbers. I can say from experience that the site is updated very quickly when the users submits these additions, updates or corrections, as I have submitted several and have seen the changes go up within a day and sometimes within the hour. I wonder how big a staff the site has to accommodate all the information that must come in every day.

The iPhone app has access to all this information and serves it up in a unique fashion. The app utilizes the Location Services of the iPhone or the iPod Touch to determine where you are and presents a screen that looks like the spinner dials on a slot machine, with the first dial listing the current city’s neighborhoods, the second dial has the various kinds of restaurants or menu types available (e.g. Pizza, Burgers, Thai, etc.) and the last dial denotes price range, with $ for “Cheap Eats” or restaurants with entrées under $10 to $$$$ for “Fine Dining” and entrées over $25. Under each dial is a little padlock icon which you can click on to lock the wheel to filter the selections to only come from say, a certain neighborhood, menu type, price range or any combination of the three. You spin the dials by either shaking the iPhone or pressing the on-screen “Shake” button and you get a little show with an animation of the dials spinning and the sounds of a slot machine, complete with the sound of a coin/token landing when its restaurant choice pops up. The app may use the paradigm of a slot machine, but it feels more like Restaurant Roulette to me, but when you live life in a Serendip, that is ok.

The app’s selection is revealed on a little bar above the Shake button and it will have a little reveal arrow on the right side of the bar which will slide across an information screen with menu type/price range, phone number (push this button to call restaurant) and address (launches Google Maps to show you the location). There will also be a box with a percentage of users that have voted “Spoon Up” for the restaurant. As an example, I just gave it a shake and it picked the local Olive Garden, which is meh, a so-so restaurant, the little box says that of the 20 users who voted, 70% like it. Below all this info, there is a “Read Reviews” button, which brings up another screen of information, which is actually identical to their mobile website page for the restaurant. On this screen, you can vote “Spoon Up” or “Spoon Down” for the restaurant, submit a picture of the restaurant (with the iPhone’s camera), read the menu if they have a link to it or submit a photo of the menu to the web site and lastly, read reviews of the restaurant.

The "Shake" screen on the Urbanspoon app. Click for larger image.

Browsing Louisville restaurants on Urbanspoon. Click for larger image.

Some of the other things you can do with the app using the buttons at the bottom of the screen are inviting friends to join Urbanspoon and see where they’ve been eating lately and what they think of those restaurants; browse all the restaurants in the city, by neighborhood, menu type or popularity among the users; search for specific restaurants or just click the “Near Me” button to see what the closest couple of restaurants are to your current location. I haven’t gotten to do much traveling in the last couple of months, but I can see where this app will be invaluable to travelers with its fun twist on finding restaurants in an unfamiliar city being the icing on the cake.

The website at www.urbanspoon.com is a very rich source of information, useful for both trip planning or just trying to find a new joint to try out in the neighborhood. If you don’t have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you can access most of the features on a web-enabled cell phone through the their mobile site at www.urbanspoon.com/m, but you won’t get the “Shake” feature and I don’t know if it will auto-locate you on a GPS phone.

The Urbanspoon app is available free at the App Store on the iPhone or iPod Touch — the iTouch need to be connected to the internet via WiFi to use this app — and we have found it valuable enough that we would have probably paid for the app!

Try it or the web site out, register and vote “Spoon Up” for your favorite restaurants and please vote “Spoon Down” for restaurants that you couldn’t be paid to go back to so the rest of us will be warned.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Urbanspoon other than the fact that they provide links back to this blog from the pages of restaurants that I have reviewed here. We are just happy users of the their app and the web site.

Tags: Apple Computer, Application, Gadget, iPhone, Restaurant, Travel