Yelp!

This weekend, I had the pleasure of visiting Boston’s North End, or their version of Little Italy. My wife and I drove down to Wonderland (an exuberant name for a subway stop that is anything but), got on the subway, rode it for three stops before we found out the rest of the line was closed for construction, got on a shuttle bus, rode to Government Center, then walked to the North End. A bit more involved than we had planned, but we made it to our destination, and quickly found a packed cafe to get a cappuccino and help refuel us after a somewhat painful commute. In the end, we went up and down the street simply trying to find the cheapest meal. We knew our meal would be decent enough at pretty much any of these restaurants.

How could I be so sure of that? It’s thanks to one of my favorite websites, Yelp!. For awhile now, I could never really figure out why you could find hundreds of review websites, and yet none of them were for restaurants. Sure, there were sites that tried like Chef Moz and Chowhound, but they never really caught on enough to be of real use. Sometimes I would search for a restaurant and find a review listed there, but rarely could I just go to that site to search out a specific restaurant.

I didn’t really understand why there wasn’t any good source of reviews for restaurants. Yes, a night on the town doesn’t cost nearly as much as a digital camera, big screen television, or signing a year lease on an apartment. But over time the costs add up, and most Americans spend thousands of dollars eating out each year. Plus, the quality of a restaurant can be just as important as the quality of other items for which there are reviews.

Then about a month ago, after having moved to Salem, I was doing some searches on Google Maps for a nice Italian restaurant to go to. Google Maps is a fantastic resource for anything local - something the internet was really lacking in. I found quite a few nearby, and clicked the nearest one. In doing so, I saw an area for reviews, and saw that several of the reviews all originated from the same website, some place called Yelp.

That was how I discovered Yelp, and have used it countless times to narrow the field for dining and take-out. And although taste can be quite subjective, I’ve found most restaurants get fairly similar reviews across the board, with the occasional outliers (I’ve actually found Mexican to be particularly hard to review, as there seems to be an ongoing battle between what is real Mexican, and what is Americanized). I found it so useful that I decided to contribute myself.