- Best Recipe App
- Best Reservations App
- Best Restaurant Review App
- Best Wine and Cocktails App
Best Restaurant Review App
After you’ve visited a restaurant (after using the OpenTable app for reservations, of course), why not let other diners know what you think of the joint? Not surprisingly, there are apps for that.
Urbanspoon
App: Urbanspoon
Publisher: Urbanspoon
Price: Free
In the world of online crowd-sourced restaurant reviews, Urbanspoon is king. Its vast user base of diners ensures that most major restaurants are covered, and you’d be surprised how detailed most of the reviews are. I always check Urbanspoon before I make reservations at a place I haven’t eaten at before.
Now you can access all of the site’s reviews from the Urbanspoon app. There are a number of different ways to browse for restaurants—by cuisine, critic’s picks, bargain gems, price, even what’s currently open nearby. Press Windows+Q to search for specific restaurants, then create your own list of favorite establishments.
After you land on a page for a given restaurant, you see the ratings percentage (X% of users liked the place), user-submitted photos, pricing and offerings, and user reviews. Click or tap the Write a Review icon to write your own review and make it visible to the rest of the Urbanspoon community.
Obviously, the more popular the restaurant the more reviews it will have. And your tastes may differ from those of other Urbanspoon users. But when you want to know as much as you can about a restaurant, the Urbanspoon app is hard to beat.
Honorable Mentions
App: FoodGraphic
Publisher: Three Screen Studios
Price: Free
App: Zalp
Publisher: kk36
Price: Free
Yelp is Urbanspoon’s biggest competitor in online restaurant reviews, and although there is no official Yelp app for Windows 8.1 (at least not yet), there are two apps that use the Yelp database. In addition to being able to find restaurants by searching or browsing a map for a given location, the FoodGraphic app provides a variety of visualizations to help you compare different restaurants. For example, you can graph ratings, reviews, and distance for selected establishments—and even compare rating versus distance and rating versus reviews. It’s a nontraditional approach that appeals to data hounds.
The Zalp app takes a more traditional approach to finding specific restaurants; you can search by either name or location. What you get in return are Yelp ratings and Zagat scores for that location. Click the Yelp or Zagat logo to open the respective websites, or click the restaurant’s logo to go to its site.