Like: Urban Spoon

I want to recommend  the website Urban Spoon.  Just like Amazon, TripAdvisor, and Yelp, it features user reviews.  Urban Spoon focuses exclusively on restaurants.  I like that  Urban Spoon is an aggregator–not only does it have user reviews that people type in when they visit the site, but it also gathers critics’ reviews from major newspapers and magazines.  For bloggers, they offer ”spoonbacks.”  If you put the Urban Spoon image in a review on your blog, they will publish your post on Urban Spoon with a link back to your blog.  It gives tiny audience bloggers like me a chance to feel famous (and I can’t help it, I love that!). 

Urban Spoon has a section for  many of the major cities in the United States.  I was pleased to see that they had one for Salt Lake.  I was even more pleased to realize that American Fork, Orem, and Provo (as well as several other small  Utah cities) are listed as neighborhoods of greater Salt Lake.  I was surprised to find how much information they  had about  restaurants in Orem and Provo.  

Urban Spoon also features a very simple thumbs up/thumbs down rating system for restaurants.  I admire the simplicity of “like/don’t like,”, but I wish they also offered an “it’s okay” option.  Also, of course there is no way to tell whether my vote of “like it” for Golden Corral is because it makes my children so happy or if it is because I am under the impression that it is incredible gourmet fare!  But I figure that is what the review section is for.  The simple rating system does have some utility.  If you sort a city or neighborhood by popularity, the consistently people pleasing restaurants do rise to the top.  This is especially valuable if you are looking for a restaurant to take a diverse group of people to.

Other features I appreciate are the wishlist (when you read a great review you can add the restaurant to your wishlist so that you remember to try it in the future), the maps (showing restaurants you’ve reviewed, or restaurants on your wishlist, or Chinese restaurants in a given neighorhood)  and the ability to compare reviews and wishlists with friends.  Give it a try;  see what you think! 

 Have you already tried Urban Spoon?  Do you use another dining review site like Yelp?  Why do you like it?  I was a fan of  TripAdvisor’s reviews, but TripAdvisor has less information about each restaurant, lacks the critics reviews, doesn’t offer a spoonback type feature, and the majority of the reviews are written from the perspective of the tourist rather than the townie.  Urban Spoon has won my allegiance.

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March 17, 2010 | Filed Under Blogging, Restaurants, Reviews 

Comments

One Response to “Like: Urban Spoon”

  1. Craig Christiansen on March 18th, 2010 10:36 pm

    I like Urban Spoon so far…. We installed google analytics on our website to be able to see where referring traffic is coming from. Since listing The Chocolate, we receive about 2-4 visits a day coming from Urban Spoon. That puts them in 4th place out of all referring websites–out of 86. So not too bad! Now if only we can get some customers to fill out reviews… :)

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