Review: LocalEats

Overview LocalEats is an app for those with taste. Most likely expensive taste. Its niche is to show you the Top 100 restaurants in your area. If you live in an area which they have covered, that's great. If not, you're out of luck. My first search "Near Me" returned "0 Great Restaurants." I guess I'll go fix a PB&J.

Functionality

What LocalEats promises to do, it does well, I suppose. Your first screen gives you options of looking at restaurants near your current location, or you can plug in a specific address. It also gives you a city list that is pretty much limited to major U.S. cities. Clicking on any of these cities will bring up a list of eating establishments in that city in alphabetical order. You can then click on the restarant name and get more information about the restaurant, including a direction button which maps it in Google Maps, a call button, and a website button. The restaurant screen also gives you details as to hours of operation, price range of meals and special features of the place. Once you're browsing a city, you have tabs at the bottom of the screen to search by restaurant categories (want Mexican?), "Best Ofs," and the default alphabetical display. Very nice.

Review

What's not nice is the app's limiting results to only certain cities. It's pretty useless for those of who live outside the areas listed. Even a seach for a growing area of Little Rock returned 0 results. Over at AppleInsider, their reviewer noted that he found 0 results for a suburb just outside Manhattan. That made me feel better about my own town. In addition, LocalEats is a little snooty - which iPhone users as a whole are NOT. You can press the fork in the upper right corner of the screen to find out their approach to the reviews:

At WhereTheLocalsEat.com, we get indigestion just thinking about relying on public opinion polls - they capture Olive Garden devotees and deep-fried-cheese addicts - to identify the best restaurants in the city... No, we prefer an authoritative approach, balancing lengthy surveys of serious diners and hopelessly hooked restaurant habitues with the opinions and extensive research of certified foodies... We'll guide you to places that aren't just great when the owner's around or when one talented chef is in the kitchen, and we'll guide you to reliable comfort food and ethnic foods not much known outside the 'hood. You won't be overwhelmed by more restaurants than you can try in a lifetime...

Hmmm. I'm still hungry, and with this approach, I think I would stay that way.

Summary

If you've got time to plan ahead and are in a major metropolitan area and are wanting to eat out in a well-reviewed restaurant by gastro-scientists, then LocalEats is for you. No, really. It does look like a nice little app - but not for most of us. I would imagine it would be extremely nice for business folks to be able to treat clients and for that special occasion out with a significant other. However, it will befall a quick delete on my iPhone. I'm off to get a cheeseburger.

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