Review: Zagat To Go '09

Overview

Zagat to Go ’09 features reviews for restaurants (and nightlife, shopping and hotels) in most major U.S. cities.

It isn’t Yelp. For one, it’s not free. For another, it only has very well-thought out and succint evaluations. If you’re left wanting by Yelp or UrbanSpoon, Zagat to Go ’09 might be right for you. Just be ready to pay $9.99 and remember that after 12/31/2009, the reviews will no longer be updated.

Features

In printed form, Zagat is considered the gold standard of restaurant guides. Zagat To Go ’09 puts those reviews on your iPhone with all the sorting and search features you would expect.

The app asks for your location via the iPhone’s location services or you can enter an address or a city. You can sort restaurants by neighborhood, cuisine, features or use top rated lists.

In addition, many restaurants on Zagat tie into OpenTable.com so you can make reservations straight from your iPhone.

Zagat uses a 30 point scale broken down into multiple categories. For restaurants, there’s a separate rating for food, decor and service. For nightlife, there’s one rating each for appeal, decor and service. For hotels, there’s ratings for rooms, service, dining and facilities.

The app also shows, with an actual dollar figure, what you can expect to pay for a meal or for a night out.

Zagat To Go ’09 also features an extensive advanced search option which allows you to do a search using minimum and maximum ratings, minimum and maximum cost, cuisines, neighborhood and features.

The Breakdown

The Good

The reviews get straight to the point and can give you a really clear picture of a what a place is like with very few words.

For someone who swears by Zagat’s reviews, it would be hard to imagine going without this app, but keep reading to see my thoughts on value.

The Bad

For $9.99 it doesn’t seem worth buying Zagat for only a year’s worth of reviews. After that, the reviews start to get stale. You’re also paying $9.99 for reviews in a dozen cities you’ll probably never visit. Zagat’s business here would probably be better served by iPhone OS version 3.0′s in app purchases. That way you could download the app for, say, $1.99 and then add each city’s reviews for another $1.99 each. Hopefully we’ll see something like that in the future.

In addition, for $9.99 you would expect an app that doesn’t crash. Zagat To Go ’09 does appear to have a few bugs that need to be worked out because it did crash a few times in testing.

Though all the sorting options were great, I disliked the time it took to find a cheap place close to my house. For example, to find an inexpensive restaurant close to me, I have to tap restaurants, neighborhood, my city (long beach), sort and then cost to find a restaurant this way.

The results page doesn’t display the actual distance, so a restaurant can still be a bit away from where I am. Distance, cost and quality all figure into my choice of picking a restaurant, but I couldn’t seem to get all three of those factors on the screen at the same time, which made the process a bit unintuitive.

The app also requires an internet connection to download the reviews. If you’re an iPod Touch owner, it would be terrible to be out on the town and then discover you can’t get a review you need. According to Handmark, developers of Zagat To Go ’09, once an establishment is viewed it is cached.

Lastly, a minor pet peeve. The text of each review features dozens and dozens of quotation marks around key phrases taken from surveys, like “well lit,” “family atmosphere,” “generous portions,” or “fresh.” All these quotation marks next to each other in a paragraph makes it hard to read.

Developer Response

I e-mailed Erica Cohen, a spokersperson for Handmark Inc., the developers of Zagat To Go ’09, with some questions I had about the app.

First, in regards to my pet peeve about the quotes, Cohen said the quotations are selected from surveyors because they summarize what the majority of respondents are saying about the restaurant. Cohen wrote that Zagat’s method is “perfect for mobile consumption since browsing dozens of user reviews for one restaurant is not effective when on the go.” This is in contrast with Yelp’s method of listing all the unedited reviews.

In response to my thoughts about the inability to get distance, cost and quality all on the same page, Cohen said “we’re currently investigating adding the distance from location to the GPS results list.”

Cohen also mentioned version 2.0 of the app is planned for release in May with improvements to the user interface, how maps are handled and application speed, among other features.

The Comparison

It’s both hard and easy to compare Zagat To Go ’09 to Yelp, a free alternative. Both apps effectively use the iPhone to deliver reviews on the go. However, they’re doing it in entirely different ways. Zagat is well-edited and aimed more at the fine dining aficionado even though it also features a lot of inexpensive places. Yelp uses unedited crowd-sourcing to get reviews of virtually anything and everything. With Yelp, you have to spend time sifting through some really skewed or poorly thought out reviews. With Zagat, you don’t have that problem but you also probably won’t find nearly as many places. Also, the actual dollar amount Zagat puts on a meal is far better than Yelp’s $, $$ or $$$ method of telling you how much it will cost.

In the end, both apps do the same thing. They help you avoid a cruddy meal and find a great one instead. It is mostly a matter of preference when it comes to trusting Zagat’s editing or reading all the reviews for yourself.

Conclusion

If you’re a Zagat guide veteran, it would be hard to convince you not to get this app. But if you’re satisfied with Yelp, it’s probably not worth $9.99 just for the convenience of not having to sift through user reviews.