Tasted Menu Releases iPhone App, Launches in Austin & Premieres New Vegetarian Feature

Where’s the best blueberry pancakes in Boston? How about the best filet mignon? Chocolate cake? Rejoice, foodies, there’s an app for that.

Today, Boston-based Tasted Menu [1] , the site that allows users to rate restaurant dishes as opposed to the entire restaurant itself, launched a full-fledged, free iPhone app [2] , allowing diners to find the best of the best grub on-the-go.

“We had known in the back of our minds that the main use case was going to be a mobile one,” says Tasted Menu founder & CEO Alex Rosenfeld. “We’ve built up a lot of great content for content, so I think we’re at a point to start addressing a broader audience.”

The app, which is similar in functionality to the Tasted Menu website, is targeted at diners in a restaurant, looking to find out the best dishes at that establishment, with photos, ratings and reviews all integrated into the app.

“It’s really focused on where to eat and where to find the best dishes,” explains Rosenfeld.

With 10,000 reviews for Boston dishes in the database, foodies won’t go hungry anytime soon. Rosenfeld says that volume of reviews is “exciting for us because that’s without having a mobile app launch. We expect that number to inflect even further once the mobile app’s out there.”

Since their beta launched in September, Tasted Menu has dramatically expanded their team. Most notably, they’ve recruited a national team of 40 menu curators with credentials like the Culinary Institute of America, the French Culinary Institute, Bon Appetit, Cooks Illustrated, Harvard and BU to incorporate additional layers of data on top of the menu.

This data, which Rosenfeld refers to as “Culinary Taxonomy,” organizes dishes into gastronomic categories, similar to how Pandora’s musicologists organize songs by sound category. “I feel like we’ve built the equivalent of that for food,” he says, comparing Tasted Menu to Pandora. For example, you can sort by “tags,” such as “burger,” to locate the top-rated burger dishes in Boston.

Through this tagging system, Tasted Menu also launched its new Veggie View feature today, which can be found on both the app and the web platforms. “Seventeen percent of Americans prefer to eat vegetarian when dining out,” says Rosenfeld, so the team has incorporated a special vegetarian-only filter on its menu.

Finally, just in time for SXSW, Tasted Menu has launched in Austin, Texas, its first city beyond Boston. The Austin launch incorporates 1,000 restaurant locations, not just in the city itself but in surrounding towns, as well. “This is the start of our national expansion,” says Rosenfeld, adding that they have a list of a dozen other cities they hope to tackle in the next 12 to 18 months.

“The exciting thing for us is that we’ve basically launched Austin from scratch in four weeks,” he says. “It makes us very confident that this is viable.”

As someone who dines out almost every night a week, I’d have to agree.

Check out this video further explaining the Tasted Menu platform.

Links

1. ^{^} Tasted Menu (www.tastedmenu.com)
2. ^{^} iPhone app (itunes.apple.com)

source: bostinno.com