Urbanspoon Blog

Restaurant Slot Machine

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When you can't decide where to eat, and you don't happen to have an iPhone handy, we have a new tool for you to try.

Enter your zip code and the slot machine will load up your local restaurants. Hit the Spin button to try your luck. To lock down a neighborhood, cuisine or price, click the padlock below the wheel.

Oh, and if you'd like to share, you can put this on your own blog or web page!

You can find a version of this widget tailored for your city here.

The slot machine graphic comes from Emily Busey, care of CityArts magazine. Thanks!

Connect with Facebook

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Late update 4/16/2009: We've added Facebook Connect to the web site as well. Look for the "Connect with Facebook" button to link your Urbanspoon account, or sign in using Facebook.

Now you can sign in to Urbanspoon on the iPhone with your Facebook account.

When you're thinking about a restaurant, wouldn't you like to see what your friends have to say about the place? And if you love a place or hate it, do you want to let your friends know? Now you can share your take on restaurants with the friends you're already connected to on Facebook.

On the iPhone click the Friends tab, then click to Connect with Facebook. As you write reviews or choose your favorite restaurants your friends will see them on Facebook. And when you're looking at a restaurant on Urbanspoon you'll see what your friends have to say about it.

This is currently only available on the iPhone, but we'll get this on the web site soon.

Patrick is down in Austin at South by Southwest where Facebook Connect for the iPhone was just announced. There's a post on this up on Facebook's blog.

So You Want to Start a Restaurant?

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Chef Thierry Rautureau, the so-called "Chef in the Hat", is an institution in Seattle. He hosts a radio program, is on a first name basis with top chefs around the country, and for twenty one years has run one of the city's finest restaurants, Rover's. He's a local celebrity chef.

Last night we had dinner with Thierry and his wife Kathy at Cascina Spinasse, a new Italian place on Capitol Hill. We chose it because it was high on all our wishlists, and because it's fun to eat Italian with a Frenchman. Also, it turns out Martha Stewart raved about it just last week, so this may be our last chance to get a table. The food didn't disappoint (particularly a delicate ravioli with Castelmagno cheese), and the decor was delightfully rustic, but we were there for the company.

At Urbanspoon we've gotten to see just how difficult the restaurant business can be. In Seattle alone we've seen a dozen restaurants open and then close up shop this past year. We were eager to chat with someone who had "made it" and see if he had any tips to pass along.

Lesson One: Shmooze

Thierry walked in the restaurant door, eponymous hat on his head, and immediately people began to greet him. Servers, fellow patrons, the owner, everyone. Half the people in the restaurant knew him from the first moment, and by the end he'd introduced himself to the other half. Many knew him from his restaurant, others knew him by reputation, and still others just wanted to meet Mr. Popular.

Needless to say, no one seemed to recognize us Urbanspoon guys. We should have worn hats.

So that's the first lesson I'd take away if you want to be a successful in the business: be sociable, don't be shy.

Lesson Two: It's a Business

When it came time to order, we carefully considered the menu and then Thierry gleefully announced, "Of course we have to try all of it". Fourteen dishes later he was still eager to try more. He regaled us with stories of his eating prowess. And he didn't limit himself to haute cuisine -- he was as effusive talking about his favorite phở joint as he was about Le Bernardin.

So clearly Chef Thierry loves food. But his mind is always on the business. There was a gleam in his eye as he talked about the bottom line. He chatted happily about Excel spreadsheets and web infrastructure. We spent hours (it was a long meal) talking about blogging, data mining, and other technical trivia and he took that as hungrily as the anchovies.

On the subject of phở, Chef Thierry predicted it's the fast food of the future. Healthy, tasty, quick, with cheap ingredients. In today's economic climate, those are considerations every would-be restaurant owner should take into account.

Food is important, but money keeps the ovens on.

Lesson Three: Don't Start a Restaurant

We got to talking about his advice for people starting a restaurant. In short, he says: don't.

But if you really want to start restaurant... still, don't.

According to Thierry, only if your compulsion is so great, so irresistible, so frankly neurotic that nothing else will satisfy. Only then should you actually start a restaurant. This way, you will either prevail or the physical and economic punishment of the restaurant business will eventually "eliminate the bug".

Lesson Four: Find a Sugar Daddy

There was one circumstance under which he felt starting a restaurant made sense: if the money doesn't matter. If the latest stock market crash didn't rattle your plans to spend a month at your place in the Hamptons and you love the romance of having your own restaurant, you just might make a perfect owner.

Photo courtesy of Lara of Plates and Packs.

Voting Day

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

First off, please go vote! If you don't know where to go, Google can help you find your polling location here.

It's an exciting day. An historic election, the culmination of almost two years of campaigning, and perhaps just as incredible...

Urbanspoon is on prime time TV!

Apple is featuring Urbanspoon in its latest ad for the iPhone. Last night we saw the ad on Dancing with the Stars, Boston Legal and Jay Leno. We are extremely grateful to Apple for including us, and to Citysearch for their help.

In what may be a good omen for Obama, the restaurant Apple chose to showcase in the ad was Sushi Bistro. Based on our analysis almost exactly a year ago, a vote for sushi is a vote for the Democrats.

Here's the ad:

2009 Michelin Guides Are Available

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

If you are a fine dining aficionado you are probably already familiar with the Michelin Guides. Michelin has long been the gold standard of restaurant ratings. For decades it was only available in Europe but for the past few years it has covered a few lucky cities in the U.S. as well.

We're honored that they asked us to help get the word out about the launch of the 2009 Michelin Guides. If you have last year's edition it's probably so dog-eared and wine-stained that you need a replacement.

In any case, we can all finally see which restaurants have won (or lost) a coveted Michelin star. You can also find Michelin's 2008 star ratings on Urbanspoon, and we'll soon be updating the site to reflect the new ratings. (Update: Urbanspoon now shows Michelin's 2009 star ratings)

Here are the dates the 2009 Michelin Guides will be available:

New York: October 7th
San Francisco (and Napa): October 14th
Los Angeles: October 21st
Las Vegas: October 21st

As part of the launch Michelin is also sponsoring a contest. You can win hundreds of dollars in restaurant gift certificates or a weekend of high-end gluttony in New York!

iPhone SDK - The Review

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Now that the NDA has finally been lifted, I can share my thoughts on building the Urbanspoon iPhone application using Apple's iPhone SDK. This was an interesting engineering challenge for me since I'd never used Objective C. In fact, I haven't owned a Mac since I graduated from college back in '97.

We had a ton of fun building Urbanspoon for the iPhone. It took around one month of development time to release the first version, and I've been dying to talk about it ever since.

iPhone API

The iPhone API is fantastic. I actually have a fair bit of experience developing APIs just like this, since I helped create TiVo's third party application platform. Let me say this - Apple did a great job. API excellence leads directly to application excellence. Everything else is secondary.

The UI library is rich and easy to use. Layout is a breeze if you use Interface Builder. The animation primitives are incredibly straightforward. Yes, you too can have an animated button in just four lines of code. Stringing together the animations in a meaningful way is more difficult.

I really like UITableView. It's easy and efficient to create tables with hundreds or even thousands of rows. The embedded WebKit-based web view is lightweight and easy to use. Our app uses UIWebView extensively, and many of our features would have been prohibitively expensive to build without it.

Building the Urbanspoon UI went smoothly as long as I stuck to the patterns in Apple's docs and sample apps. Anytime I deviated, there was usually hell to pay. The two most challenging bits of the Urbanspoon UI are managing the UITabBarController and manipulating the UINavigationBar for our embedded browser screens. I had to write reams of tricky code to work around the default behavior for those classes.

Naturally, there are many edge cases that need to be debugged and worked around, but that's the case with any UI library. The iPhone UI API has fewer gotchas than most - trust me.

The GPS API is finicky and confusing. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say that I had to use a fairly elaborate system of timers and state flags to manage the GPS API.

The accelerometer API is functional but bare bones. It'll give you the raw x/y/z values, but you may have to dig out Knuth if you want to do something more complicated like detect a shake! Luckily there's some sample code to help with the signal processing.

The high level sound API is fine for simple apps like Urbanspoon that basically want to play WAVs. If you need something more complicated, you'll have to delve into the horrors of the CrashLanding sample. It contains an entire, C++ audio mixer. Never could make it work, unfortunately.

Getting photos from the camera is trivial. That's why we quickly added features to Urbanspoon like "upload a menu" and "add a photo".

The underlying network api is easy to use. Unfortunately, you're on your own if you want to do something web-centric like construct a POST request.

Objective C

On first exposure, I found Objective C to be verbose and obtuse. I longed for the comforts of Ruby, or even Java. Objective C is a huge step up from C++, but inherits many of the same problems.

Classes are split up into separate interface/implementation sections, just like in C++. There's some support for properties with generated accessors, but the syntax is complex and verbose.

Memory management is a chore. All objects are ref counted. Most of the ref counting happens under the hood, using "auto release" objects, which are automatically released when the event loop finishes processing the current event. Unfortunately, some references have to be manually incremented and decremented, which is unpleasant since Objective C lacks the templating mechanisms that made this marginally tolerable in C++. It becomes especially complicated when you mix in properties. There's a huge difference between self.foo = bar and plain old foo = bar.

Also, it took me a stupidly long time to understand the naming convention in the API that differentiates between auto released objects and objects that must be retained.

The array, hashtable and enumerator classes work great, though again I found myself pining for Ruby.

For the Urbanspoon application, I didn't have to deal with threads at all. Let me repeat that - no mutexes. No deadlocks. No races. All of my code runs in response to events delivered from my application's event loop. That includes UI events, networking notifications, GPS updates, and timer events from my own code. This is infinitely better than what I've seen from many other similar platforms. The iPhone event loop is the bomb!

String processing is painful. There's a nice String class, naturally, but you're basically out of luck if you need do something "complicated" like escape a URL parameter. Forget about regular expressions. It might take you a while just to figure out how to join an array or split a string.

SDK Tools (docs, xcode, simulator...)

The documentation is great. Simply put, probably the best docs I've ever used in any SDK. The API is clearly explained, with the right level of detail. The walkthroughs are geared toward actually getting stuff done.

Xcode itself worked fine. Honestly, I do most of my editing in emacs and compile from the command line. The docs are built into Xcode and the search is nice and fast. The gdb-based debugger is nothing to write home about, especially compared to Visual Studio, but it gets the job done. Compilation is very quick.

The iPhone simulator is absolutely amazing. I love it. Mostly, I love that it starts up quickly and integrates with the debugger in Xcode. It's light years ahead of some other Java-based SDKs I've tried. The simulator does a decent job of acting like an iPhone, though it's difficult to test important integration points like GPS or the accelerometer.

iPhone screens are designed using Interface Builder. This is a great tool. It's really easy to construct a screen, and then wire both the widgets and the events into your code. Once I figured out how the damn thing worked, I relied on it every day and sent positive thoughts toward the Apple engineers that built it.

Deployment

How hard is it to get your amazing app onto the phone? Unfortunately, deployment is a challenge. The Apple Discussion forums are filled with cries for help and questions about obscure error messages.

Installing an app onto the iPhone from Xcode is hard. First you have to navigate Apple's secure but complex system of certificates, application ids and provisioning profiles. Then you'll have to tweak a handful of insufficiently documented settings in Xcode. Finally, you may have to reboot or possibly even reflash your iPhone to avoid the dreaded 0xE800001 error.

Once your app is ready for release, you get to use Apple's iTunes Connect web site to get ready for the App Store. First you have to tweak another handful of poorly documented settings. Then you zip up your app and upload it to iTunes Connect. Rinse and repeat until iTunes Connect blesses the upload.

I won't address the concerns that other folks have raised about Apple's approval process. I haven't found it to be a particular burden, and Apple has definitely identified bugs in my app that would've impacted users. Your mileage may vary.

Post-Ship

Once your app is deployed in the wild, it can be hard to keep track of what's happening. Apple doesn't provide crash logs for released apps. If you're really dedicated, you can build a logging system that sends you some types of anonymized crash traces. We did.

Apple doesn't tell you anything about usage. Luckily, much of our app is web based so we can lean on analytics and log file processing. We built an in house reporting tool that tells us things like - how many iPhones used Urbanspoon today? How many were new users? How many users upgraded today?

Conclusion

Urbanspoon on the iPhone is a tremendous success. The iPhone is an incredibly well executed platform. The SDK tools are powerful and fast. The API is well designed and easy to use. If you can stomach Objective C, you can quickly build rich applications. Don't let concerns about Apple get in the way - this is a compelling platform that really deserves your attention.

Something to Twitter about

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We've recently embraced the phenomenon that is Twitter. If you haven't used Twitter, it's a simple way to share short messages with the world, and to follow people you think might have interesting things to say. Each message on Twitter is called a "tweet". If you're not using Twitter yet, but would like to give it a try, it's free and pretty easy to set up an account.

Here are some of the things we're doing with Twitter:

Tweet a Review - When you write a restaurant review, check the box "Tweet this review" and your review and a link to the restaurant will be posted to your Twitter feed.
"Tweet This" - If you have our iPhone app, every page has a "Tweet This" link. You can use this to tell your friends where you're eating, or send out an on-the-go review.
@urbanspoon - We've started tweeting interesting things (we hope) about Urbanspoon. If you're interested, please follow us: twitter.com/urbanspoon. We do read Twitter messages addressed to us (you can can address us by including @urbanspoon in your message).

Happy tweeting!

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When considering a new restaurant, a few simple pictures can really help give you a sense of whether it's your kind of place or not. A picture is helpful whether it's a photo of the logo, an overview of the room, or a close up of an interesting looking dish.

We have decided to ask all of our users (and especially the 600,000 of you who have installed Urbanspoon on your iPhones) to share your great pictures of restaurants to help your fellow diners decide where to eat. You'll get credit next to your pictures for helping make Urbanspoon the best place to discover new restaurants.

There are two ways to share your pictures:

If you are on an iPhone, use Search, Near Me or Browse to find the restaurant you want to add a picture to. On the restaurant's info page, there will be an "Add Photo" link in the top right corner.
You can also upload your photos at our web site, just browse or search Urbanspoon to find the restaurant you'd like to add photos to. Then in the left margin, you will find a link to "Add Photo".

Photos from users: martin, simwalker, Nan, PhilD, G-Man, gbrown5, JASMINE, cgdesign

Vive Montréal!

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:45:00 +0000

Urbanspoon's march to expand to your favorite cities continues. We've been covering Canada since our early days. One city we've always wanted to add was Montréal, but we were daunted by its bilingual nature.

Well, we've finally taken the plunge. We simply can't ignore this great city any longer. With the continuing success of our iPhone app, the cries to add Montréal have grown into a dull roar. So, without further ado, I present to you Urbanspoon Montréal.

Now, we're going out on a limb here. The restaurant listing accuracy of Montréal is not where we wanted it to be for launch. We are asking all of our users who are familiar with Montréal to help us clean up our listings. If we are missing restaurants, help us add them. If restaurants are closed or need fixing up, let us know. The only way Montréal will be a truly great city is with the participation of our community.

In the meantime, I'm currently working on adding a couple more international cities that we're very excited about, so stay tuned for more good news!

6,000,000 Shakes in 10 Days

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:03:00 +0000

In the last week and a half people have been shaking their iPhones furiously looking for restaurants using Urbanspoon. Here's what we've seen in the last 10 days:

6,000,000 shakes
300,000 iPhones have downloaded the application
1,000 shakes a minute at peak
20 shakes per iPhone

Here's a look at where all that shaking is happening. We mapped every shake to the latitude and longitude where it took place.

Or see a time-lapse animation over the course of a 24 hour period

Extra! Extra! New York Times features Urbanspoon

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:49:00 +0000

Photo from the New York Times

We're really excited about the Urbanspoon iPhone application. It's been out less than a week, and already people have shaken their phones 2,000,000 times looking for a restaurant. If you have an iPhone, you can get the app here.

As happy as that makes me, the icing on the cake is that this morning we were featured on the front page of the New York Times dining section. Just below a serious news article on hamburgers.

The New York Times restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, is something of a rock star in foodie circles. So you can imagine we were a little giddy the other day when he sent us an email out of the blue. This past weekend apparently he spent hours running around New York City, shaking the phone and testing the results against his own professional opinion. He wasn't always thrilled with our suggestions, but I suppose it wouldn't be a Bruni review without some high-brow criticism.

With articles in USA Today, Time, Forbes, the London Telegraph and dozens of other publications, it's been a very happy week for the Urbanspoon PR department.

Urbanspoon on the iPhone

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:06:00 +0000

Have you ever had trouble deciding where to eat? Maybe you're going out with a group and you're suffering from collective paralysis. Or maybe you just want to discover a new restaurant. We have a solution for you. If you have an iPhone old or new, download Urbanspoon for the iPhone.

Urbanspoon on the iPhone is part Magic 8 Ball, part slot machine. You shake your phone and it finds a good nearby restaurant for you. Keep shaking it until it comes back with something you want to try.

We use the iPhone's accelerometers to pick up the "shake", find restaurants near you through GPS, and then skew the results towards restaurants that are highly regarded on Urbanspoon.

The app is now available (free of course) on the iTunes App Store for both the original iPhone and the new iPhone 3G.

Download it here.

London Calling

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:16:00 +0000

In honor of Independence Day, and in commemoration of our split from England 232 years ago, we're now covering London.

But London is probably the world's most cosmopolitan city. Chicken Tikka Masala has replaced Fish and Chips as the national dish -- nearly 10% of the city's 12,000 restaurants serve Indian food. Another 1,000 restaurants are Italian. For those seeking the traditional, never fear, there are still some 800 pubs scattered around the city.

If you're planning to use the London Underground to get around, we've added a handy map. Just click on a tube station to see all the restaurants within walking distance.

In any case, we're very excited here at Urbanspoon. We love London, and at last we are a truly global operation.

Urbanspoon Happy Hour

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:09:00 +0000

We had the pleasure of meeting up with a couple dozen food bloggers here in Seattle last night at a new favorite, Artemis Cafe. It was our first official Urbanspoon gathering. Thanks to all who were able to come, sorry to those who couldn't -- we'll have to do this again!

Oh, and Wesa over at Seattle Metblog has some really lovely food photos from the evening.

Aloha from Urbanspoon

Tue, 27 May 2008 21:29:00 +0000

We here at Urbanspoon are total suckers for a tropical paradise, so we are all pretty excited about our newest "city". As the urban part of our name implies, so far we've focused on metropolitan centers. But as we were working on Honolulu, we realized that Urbanspoon Hawaii called for a different solution.

While Oahu hosts a lot of great eating and the majority of the restaurants, to neglect Maui, Kauai or the other islands just because they don't have as many traffic lights seems unfair. Also, we need a business excuse to "research" restaurants on all the islands next time we are there.

So to those of you who are visiting the islands, or the lucky few who live there: we envy you. We hope you'll find Urbanspoon useful, whether you're looking for poi in Poipu, pupus in Pa'ia, coffee in Kona, or just a cold Mai Tai on Waikiki.

A hui hou!

Photo by flickr user giniger used under a Creative Commons license.

Do latte drinkers really vote for Obama?

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:38:00 +0000

The media is abuzz with speculation that Barack Obama is an elitist. A few weeks ago, at a rally for Hillary Clinton, one of her more strident local boosters proclaimed the following about Obama supporters:

“I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter.”
-Tom Buffenbarger, Youngstown, Ohio

You may have cheered, you may have been offended, but hearing Mr. Buffenbarger's words you must also have wondered: is he right?

Having previously drawn political fire for suggesting the connection between steak, sushi, and voting habits, your plucky statisticians at Urbanspoon decided to roll up their sleeves and dive into this conflict.

Do latte drinkers really vote for Obama?

Is there really a connection between sipping your double tall breve and voting for Obama? We'll leave political analysis to the professionals, but this is the kind of food question we're equipped to investigate. Unfortunately, we can't directly measure how much latte everyone is drinking. But as an approximation, we looked at the number of Starbucks stores per capita on a state-by-state basis. Compare this to how states voted in the primary:

The blue line measures the percentage by which Obama beat (or lost to) Clinton. The green dots represent the number of Starbucks stores per million people for each state. The black line is the trend line of Starbucks stores, drawn to make it easier to see the relationship between voting and latte sipping.

My statistics professor might be rolling over in his grave to hear me say it, but there's a mild but real correlation here!* States with more latte-purveying Starbucks stores are more likely to have gone for Obama.

Is it possible Mr. Buffenbarger was on to something? We should probably call it a day, but let's leave our comfort zone (food) and look at the rest of his statement.

Prius drivers

Toyota won't tell us how their buyers are voting, so again we'll need an approximation. Fortunately, the folks at hybridcars.com and R.L. Polk came to our rescue. They track how many hybrids are sold per capita in each state. Comparing that with voting preferences, we can see how states with lots of Prius drivers vote, and by inference who those individuals support.

Huh. There isn't the faintest whiff of a correlation here. I suppose it's possible that all Prius drivers are, in fact, Obama supporters, but that's sure not reflected in the way hybrid-friendly states are voting. Let's move on.

Birkenstock wearers

Where the Prius failed, perhaps Birkenstock will prove a better measure of elitism. Birkenstock was kind enough to provide some sales statistics so that we could once again map against voting this primary season:

Wow. Nothing. Nada. No correlation.

Birkenstock asked me not to publish the specific numbers, but if you're wondering about the outliers -- the big winner, with the most Birkenstocks per capita was a shock to me: Wyoming. Not exactly the typical "elitist" state.

Trust fund babies

This is a tricky one, because there's no National Association of Trust Fund Babies to turn to. We could just assume all trust fund babies are sipping latte at Starbucks and refer to figure 1, but that wouldn't serve the interests of science. Instead, let's assume that trust fund babies have one thing in common, money, and look at how wealth stacks against voting habits. Let's look at per capita earnings per state, and compare that to how each state voted.

Again, what's really striking here is how little correlation we see.

Stick to the latte

Based on this exacting analysis, what can we say about the upcoming Pennsylvania primary? Well, apparently it's meaningless that Pennsylvania has fewer Priuses (Prii?), fewer Birkenstocks, and a lower per capita income than the national average. However, they also have fewer Starbucks than average, and that could make a difference. If you have only Mr. Buffenbarger's criteria to go by, Mr. Obama might be crying into his latte come April 22nd.

On a personal note: I don't drink lattes, don't drive a Prius and I certainly don't have a trust fund. I do, however, have a great pair of Birkenstocks. Can you guess who I voted for?

* For all those statisticians out there, the correlation coefficient relating the number of Starbucks locations to Obama voting is 0.31. You might argue the outliers are exerting too much influence here, but removing them did not markedly change the correlation.

Photos by flickr users journeyscoffee, C4Chaos, and Jason Huang used under Creative Commons license.

Baltimore vs. Tampa

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:16:00 +0000

vs.

The Baltimore Orioles are kicking off the season with a three game series against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays on Monday.

By a total fluke we added Baltimore and Tampa Bay to Urbanspoon just this week. Coincidence? Fate? I don't know. But if you're a baseball fan who'd like to eat something a little more substantial than a hot dog, you are in luck. Now you can find a decent restaurant near Oriole Park.

For those in Tampa, you'll have to wait until the 8th (against Seattle) to pick a restaurant near Tropicana Field.

Your Profile

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We've just put together a new Profile page where you can upload your photo and share your restaurant opinions with the world.

Once you upload a profile photo, a thumbnail version will appear next to each of your reviews. At the top of your profile you'll find a news feed showing your latest activities on Urbanspoon. Your profile also shows your reviews, favorites, wishlist, and votes.

But wait, there's more! On the left side of the page you can find useful statistics on your dining (or at least restaurant-voting) habits. You can see which neighborhoods and types of food predominate in your restaurant list.

We've also made it easier to add friends and compare restaurant picks with them. And when your friends vote, you'll see their opinions highlighted on the restaurant page.

Anyway, we're very excited about it. Check out my new-and-improved profile.

Dine for Darfur

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:30:00 +0000

Not that you need an extra excuse to eat out, but it's a rare treat when you can enjoy a meal and help people at the same time.

Some of the best restaurants in Seattle and Portland are banding together to help relief efforts in Darfur. Next Tuesday, March 4th, if you eat at one of the participating Dine for Darfur restaurants, 25% of the tab will be donated to Mercy Corps.

And since so many great places are taking part, you won't have to go out of your way to help. You can start your day with a coffee, grab a slice of pizza for lunch, and end with a swanky dinner, all secure in the knowledge that you're doing good.

See participating establishments:

Seattle restaurants
Portland restaurants

Granted this is nice PR for these restaurants. Still, it is a really good cause and these places are going out of their way to make a difference. Good for them!

Most Romantic City

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:25:00 +0000

It's well known that restaurants are packed on Valentine's day, but we decided to actually crunch the numbers and answer the burning question:

Which city in the US is the most romantic?
^*of the 29 cities covered by Urbanspoon

Most of our cities received abnormally high traffic on Valentine's day, and a few in particular seem to be tremendously romantic. Unfortunately, one of our cities lagged decidedly behind. Based on our rigorous statistical analysis of these patterns, we can definitively conclude the following.

Dallas is the most romantic city by far. Big D wins big. Las Vegas is the least romantic city by a landslide. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and has absolutely nothing to do with love.

Here are the complete results:

City		Valentine's Day Traffic
Dallas	+118%
Toronto	+66%
Miami	+58%
Calgary	+58%
Portland	+54%
St. Louis	+53%
Twin Cities	+51%
San Diego	+51%
Vancouver	+50%
Houston	+46%
Cleveland	+40%
Los Angeles	+38%
Orange County	+35%
SF Bay Area	+34%
Phoenix	+33%
Pittsburgh	+32%
Austin	+31%
Boston	+28%
New York	+27%
Orlando	+27%
Washington DC	+26%
Research Triangle	+24%
Philadelphia	+22%
Seattle	+21%
Chicago	+19%
Detroit	+13%
Denver	+12%
Atlanta	+10%
Las Vegas	-14%