IF you were searching for a restaurant that would please almost anyone, Dressler, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, might well be it.
Good-looking? Definitely. Menu? Contemporary American, with a mix of
fish, meat and meatless options. Its prices aren’t stratospheric, its
vibe is relaxed and its reviews have been solid. It even picked up a
Michelin star last year.
So why didn’t the new iPhone want me to go there?
I was standing smack in front of Dressler, using the phone’s
Urbanspoon restaurant-search application, which was supposed to
pinpoint my location and recommend the best options nearby.
I shook the iPhone, which is how you activate a search.
It directed me to a wine bar several blocks away.
I shook again.
It directed me to an Italian restaurant all the way over the Williamsburg Bridge, in the East Village.
With another shake, a Williamsburg coffeehouse came up, and with yet another
shake it was back to the East Village. Even when I specified
“Williamsburg” as my preferred neighborhood and “American” as my
preferred cuisine, Dressler didn’t come up right away.
It was a laggard, an afterthought, and thus revealed the foibles and
limitations of the Internet dining guides to which more and more of us
are turning for help.
On Saturday night, the day after the iPhone 3G came out, I recruited
a friend who had purchased one to join me in an experiment. For more
than four hours we bopped around the city, asking Urbanspoon to suggest
somewhere good to eat.
The iPhone 3G possesses sophisticated G.P.S. technology, and
Urbanspoon, a Seattle-based company that was founded two years ago, has
a special version of its regular search engine that takes advantage of
that technology. It identifies the 200 or so restaurants in its
database nearest to where you are. Then it tells you which are your
best bets.
We’d see about that.
Although we were testing Urbanspoon, which is restaurant-specific
and covers more than 50 cities with a razzmatazz all its own, some of
what we learned applies to other popular free Internet guides like
Citysearch, Menupages and Yelp.
All provide handy, valuable listings for restaurants in many cities,
broken down into categories like cuisine, neighborhood and price.
But their information can be frustratingly outdated, incomplete and subjective. Urbanspoon taught us that.
Owners of iPhones can download Urbanspoon free from the online
iPhone applications store. It works on old iPhones as well as the new
ones, though new models are supposed to do a better job of figuring out
precisely where you are, a process that can take anywhere from 30
seconds to several long minutes.
Urbanspoon has amusing graphics. When you shake the iPhone in the
manner of a Magic Eight Ball, its “accelerometer,” a motion sensor,
prompts three vertical columns to spin like those of a slot machine.
There’s a left column for neighborhood, a center column for cuisine
and a right column for price, signified by one to four dollar signs.
When the spinning columns come to rest, the name of the restaurant they
signify appears in big letters below them.
For someone using Urbanspoon in the West 50s, for example, those
columns might stop on Hell’s Kitchen, Thai and a single dollar sign.
Underneath those columns: Pam Real Thai Food.
You can press the restaurant’s name for more information, including
its address and telephone number. If you press the telephone number,
the phone calls the restaurant.
Between shakes, you can lock in a neighborhood, a cuisine or a
specific number of dollar signs, and Urbanspoon will refine the search,
limiting it to the established criteria.
Without refinement, searches tend to spit out a curious hodgepodge,
as my friend, Gary, and I discovered at the beginning of our
experiment, in his apartment just south of Union Square.
I repeatedly shook Gary’s pristine iPhone, which he had waited in
line for eight hours to get, as if I were making a Bond movie’s worth
of martinis. He looked petrified.
Raymond McCrea Jones and Gabriel Dance/The New York Times
HUNGRY AND A LITTLE DIZZY A panorama of 14th Street
and Ninth Avenue in the meatpacking district, consisting of many
individual photographs taken over a short period of time and stitched
together into a single image. Frank Bruni, using a restaurant-finding
feature on an iPhone, was guided to several spots in the neighborhood,
but only after a few persistent tries.
credit - Frank Bruni, using a restaurant-finding feature on an iPhone,
- Over the course of about a dozen shakes, Urbanspoon variously guided
us to a gastropub of sorts named Jimmy’s No. 43, Union Square Cafe, the
Thai restaurant Holy Basil, the Eastern European restaurant Veselka,
Daphne’s Caribbean Express, and the Japanese restaurant Soba-Ya.
What pushed them toward the top of Urbanspoon’s list of nearby
restaurants? All had a high percentage of positive ratings from a
sizeable number of Urbanspoon users, and that’s the principal factor
that determines whether — and how soon into a search — a restaurant is
flagged. If Urbanspoon users haven’t visited and taken a shine to a
place, you’ll be shaking your way to carpal tunnel syndrome before it
pops up.
At our next location, on the corner of Madison Avenue and 38th
Street, the first restaurants that Urbanspoon nudged Gary and me toward
included Burger Heaven, which is utterly casual and inexpensive, and
Artisanal, which is neither.
I locked in a price of two dollar signs and shook again. Up came the
Morgan Dining Room, and off went an alarm in my head. Isn’t the Morgan
Dining Room a lunch place that’s closed most nights? I called to make
sure, and, sure enough, got a recording.
Urbanspoon is more of a beginning than an end, unable to factor in,
for example, whether the restaurant it’s recommending books up a month
in advance (Babbo, for example) or often has long waits (Momofuku Ssäm
Bar). That’s a troublesome shortcoming in New York, where competition
for seats in the most popular places is fierce.
And while car-happy residents of other cities may consider a mile
and a half a negligible distance, a New Yorker using Urbanspoon
probably wants a recommendation within an easy walk. Urbanspoon doesn’t
give a restaurant that’s two blocks away any greater priority than one
that’s 20 blocks away, if both are within the universe of the 200
restaurants closest to where you’re standing. Hence the recommendations
in the East Village for someone in Williamsburg.
It nonetheless performs admirably at times.
I tried to stump it by traveling to the corner of Amsterdam Avenue
and 144th Street, which isn’t exactly Prominent Restaurant Central. I
wondered if Urbanspoon would come up with anything remotely close by.
In fact, it found three tenable options — the Indian restaurant Ajanta,
the American restaurant Coogan’s, and Dinosaur BBQ — within 30 or so
blocks.
Gary and I put it to a different kind of test on the block of Elizabeth Street just south of Houston.
The Tasting Room, which was on this block, closed more than a month
ago. Shortly before that, the restaurant Elizabeth opened across the
street. With a few shakes, Urbanspoon nonetheless guided me to the
Tasting Room. Even after many shakes, it never suggested Elizabeth,
instead recommending Rialto, which was the restaurant that Elizabeth
replaced. Rialto hasn’t been open for half a year.
I checked later on the Urbanspoon Web site, and Elizabeth was in
fact in its database. But only two users had been there: not enough,
understandably, to give it a high Urbanspoon ranking.
Urbanspoon depends in part on publications and blogs that may not be
accurate or up to date and in part on its users, who aren’t always on
the ball. Thus, some restaurants get labels that don’t quite fit.
Kittichai, a predominantly Thai restaurant in SoHo, is labeled as both
Thai and American, so if you search for an American restaurant in that
neighborhood, it will come up.
Price determinations may be overly broad or misleading. By
Urbanspoon’s reckoning, the Italian restaurants A Voce and dell’Anima
fall into the same three-dollar-sign category. Trust me: you’ll spend
more at A Voce.
To conclude our experiment, Gary and I hit the dining maelstrom
known as the meatpacking district, and for the sake of poetry parked
ourselves at an outdoor table at Vento within view of the Apple store where Gary had stood in line. We could also see Spice Market and Pastis.
Neither of those restaurants came up on the first shake, which
pointed us instead toward a Thai restaurant in Chelsea named Room
Service. Second shake: Elephant & Castle in Greenwich Village.
Third shake: the Spotted Pig in the West Village, and easily the best
restaurant of the bunch.
I specified the meatpacking district and Italian to see if Vento
would come up. It did — after Barbuto, Revel and Macelleria. To
Urbanspoon’s credit, the results were an arguably accurate measure of
Vento’s esteem among savvy diners.
Those same diners have affection for Pastis. If I specified meatpacking district and French, how soon would it come up?
I shook the iPhone just once.
Bingo: Pastis.
It was a just call, but good luck getting a last-minute table during the whirlwind of a Saturday night.
credit - NYT
Posted By benwilson On July 25, 2008 @ 9:48 am In News | No Comments
Seeing
as how Web services today are becoming more and more multi-faceted and
multi-functional, particularly in the social networking and social
media space, it really is open to debate what is and what is not part
of a specific segment of the market. Where blogging starts and where
networking ends, for instance, is a gray area that has grown ever
larger with time. Mobile utilities in particular have evolved to
contain powerful assets that accomplish several tasks at once. 
Technorati Favorites
