Food 2.0: Restaurant reviews and recipes
Monday, August 27, 2007
Every mainstream newspaper and food magazine has a treasure trove of restaurant reviews and/or recipes that are, at the most, archived or stashed in a shoe box by some homely octogenarian. Its time to dust off those clips and put them to good use.
Instead of forcing readers to recall a restaurant they read some time ago, create an online database of your restaurant reviews. Maps would come in handy here especially if they are searchable by location and categorized by food type, atmosphere, price, etc. Yelp and Citysearch do this quite well (better than most media outlets anyway) for restaurants across the country. Both include both editorial and user reviews as well as photos and maps.
While we're on the subject of food (and because I'm getting hungry) I can imagine the tons and tons of recipes that have been written over the years that are sitting in the news library somewhere. Its time to put those babies online, and because this a multimedia world, why not show your readers how to make those recipes? My favorite part of the L.A. Times building was the test kitchen where all the recipes were cooked before they were printed. If you have such a space, or even a presentable kitchen, get a camera in there and show em how its done. Chow.com uses video to show its visitors how to butterfly a chicken, poach an egg and pimp a burger (?)
A great YouTube cooking lesson from Cooking with Kids after the jump.
Foodieview tackles both restaurant reviews and recipes in an elegant, well-organized way. The site also features a blog and makes use of widgets and Google Maps.
Instead of forcing readers to recall a restaurant they read some time ago, create an online database of your restaurant reviews. Maps would come in handy here especially if they are searchable by location and categorized by food type, atmosphere, price, etc. Yelp and Citysearch do this quite well (better than most media outlets anyway) for restaurants across the country. Both include both editorial and user reviews as well as photos and maps.
While we're on the subject of food (and because I'm getting hungry) I can imagine the tons and tons of recipes that have been written over the years that are sitting in the news library somewhere. Its time to put those babies online, and because this a multimedia world, why not show your readers how to make those recipes? My favorite part of the L.A. Times building was the test kitchen where all the recipes were cooked before they were printed. If you have such a space, or even a presentable kitchen, get a camera in there and show em how its done. Chow.com uses video to show its visitors how to butterfly a chicken, poach an egg and pimp a burger (?)
A great YouTube cooking lesson from Cooking with Kids after the jump.
Foodieview tackles both restaurant reviews and recipes in an elegant, well-organized way. The site also features a blog and makes use of widgets and Google Maps.
1 Comments:
commented by 
friendsEAT.com, 8:41 AM
friendsEAT.com, 8:41 AM 
Facebook Food (Sept 12, 2007) -
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?api_key=90c292a83105c1712123df71ed66457b
It leverages our current social network systems with some of Facebook's social interactions.
Users are able to:
--Become a fan of a restaurant or a recipe (and tell your friends you're a fan)
--Share and view thousands of user generated recipes
--Find and review over 120,000 restaurants
--Comment on people's pages
--Use your existing FriendsEAT on Facebook
A couple different things about FriendsEAT and our Food application is that the majority of reviews are sent
directly to the restaurant. So you're voice is definitely heard.
We'd also released our FriendsEAT Video app (9/22/2007):
--View and Post Thousands of User-Generated food and dining Videos
--Embedded them into your Blog and User pages
We will be adding new features to Food over the next few weeks but we'd love for you to check it out.
Give me a buzz anytime.
bvalbuena@friendsEAT.com