Urbanspoon — restaurant reviews for Seattle

By Vivek Puri | November 1st, 2006 at 07:40 am ET         

Urbanspoon is a new site focusing on providing restaurant reviews in the Seattle area. Founded by Adam and Ethan who had previously worked together at Jobster, Urbanspoon seems to be shaping up well.

At Urbanspoon you can search for restaurants by keyword or browse by Seattle neighborhoods or by the type of food you are interested in. Urbanspoon guys have developed an intuitive interface for viewing, rating and commenting restaurants. Review page for a restaurant shows the rating, location information, food type, pricing, links to menu, reviews by other major publications, comments, restaurant address plotted onto Google Maps, and nearby restaurants. Urbanspoon also enables users to edit restaurant information, which is approved by the Urbanspoon team before it is reflected in the site. Urbanspoon also keeps track of all the restaurants you have reviewed and rated.

It will be too early to comment on the content and amount of data available at Urbanspoon, so I will save my words for a later date. From the interface perspective, I will like to see just a small change from Urbanspoon. While browsing a restaurant category, ratings below 50% are show in green color, while higher ratings are in red. I think it should be the other way round.

Urbanspoon has just started its journey in a market which has lot of established players like Judy’s Book and Yelp, who also cover restaurants among other things. Urbanspoon does seems to have bigger plans than being just focused on Seattle. Looking at the URL for Urbanspoon http://www.urbanspoon.com/c/Seattle.html, it is clearly evident that Urbanspoon will be adding more cities at a later stage.

Related:
Deals at Judy’s Book Launched

Links:
Urbanspoon

Tags: StartupSquad - Web-20 - local - search - reviews