Urbaspoon By: RK

3/20/11
All ages (mainly people interested in restaurants, and tourists)
Free
For: iPhone, iPod, iPad

Let’s say your driving through a foreign city, or at least it is to you, and you are getting hungry. Because you don’t know the area well, you don’t know the hot spots to eat. One word:  Urbanspoon. This app is a restaurant locater that can do anything from find your current location to sharing the restaurant you find with a friend. This app is a great download, and serves its purpose well.

Urbanspoon has four main sections, once you get into its home page. In order to get to the home page, you have to either pick a city manually, or you can let the app’s GPS system find your current location. Once you’re in, there are four icons: Shake, Nearby, Friends, and Browse. Step by step, I hope to show you how great this app can really be, and helpful it can be.

    If you click on the icon labeled “Shake”, three scrolling columns should pop up. The first column tells you the names of neighborhoods in the area of your location. For example, if you are in Chicago, some neighborhoods that come up are the Loop, Hyde Park, and many others. The second column is the types of food that are available. Lastly, the third column is the price range. You can lock any or all of the columns to get results customized for only for you. Also, you can filter the selections by whether or not you want a chain, whether the restaurant is popular, and which meal you’re looking for, depending on the time of day. Once you find a restaurant you like, click on it, and it gives you the address, or you can save it. “Shake” is great if you really don’t know ANYTHING about the area.

If you click on the icon labeled “Nearby”, you can find restaurants that are in your general area. This category will give you either a list of restaurants, or a map of where the restaurants are located. This can help you get to the destination you would like to have.

If you click on the icon labeled “Friends”, you can “invite friends”, or in other words, share with your friends the restaurant ideas that you had. You can also connect to Urbanspoon through Facebook to share with your pals even further.

Finally, if you click on the icon labeled “browse”, you can narrow down your search by a series of options. You can pick by restaurants you have saved, by neighborhood, and by types of food. You can also choose a restaurant by whether it has delivery, or other features, by popular restaurants, by the “talk of the town”, or by top contributors. “Neighborhoods”, based on the location you put in, gives you a list of neighborhoods alphabetically. In “Types of Food”, you can pick from different cultures’ food. In “popular restaurants”, basically there is a list of top restaurants categorized in popularity order. “Talk of the Town” is what critics have recently been talking about, and “Top Contributors” is based on a series of categories, for example, most reviews, most votes, etc. This is a good way to find a restaurant without having any preference of a place.

    This app is free and is a great quality for having no charge.

    Urbanspoon is a great app! The general design of the app is appealing and easy to work with. The categories are clear, which makes it easy to do what you want quickly. For the “nearby” section, finding your location can be hard, and it doesn’t always find your location. I recommend this app for tourists, and for anyone who enjoys eating out. All in all, the app, Urbanspoon, is a great download, and a huge help with touring a new place, or going out.


**Urbanspoon also has a website with the same features (www.urbanspoon.com)