Web Week: Online Eats
[Okay, so it’s going to be less like ‘Web Week’ and more like like ‘Web Two or Three Weeks’. Whatever. I have more sites to share, and I’m not stopping just because my lack of blogging time has made the series title increasingly inaccurate.]
If you live in New York City, you doubtless already use Menu Pages. The idea is simple: restaurant menus, online. The execution, however, is astounding: the site has a menu for every single New York restaurant I’ve tried, and that includes all of the high-end, not a chance they would hand out paper copies or publish their menus online themselves sort of places. I’m not sure how they do it, I’m not sure how they make money, and I don’t really care.
Of late, they’ve expanded to a handful of other cities, and it seems they’re hoping to target even more. And while, from what I hear from my far-flung contacts, the site hasn’t sunk in roots quite so deep in those additional locations, I suspect it’s only a matter of time.
Slightly newer, though equally on the rise, and targeting a more national audience (albeit a handful of cities at a time) from the get-go is SeamlessWeb, a web-based food delivery service. Like MenuPages, however, it’s not the idea but the execution that makes this site stand out. Unlike the countless others I’ve seen in the space in years past, this one actually, consistently works.
Their listing of restaurants is growing fast (and already surprisingly complete here in New York), their site is easy to use, and their process (which, for example, generates an email only after the restaurant has confirmed the order themselves) is well designed to ensure reliability.
Best of all, the site solves the two biggest pains of delivery: they accept credit cards (rather than just wads of cash) at all of the restaurants, and they understand exactly what you want to order (even with customization of individual items) without your yelling into the phone to make yourself heard over restaurant din.
Toss in OpenTable for web-based reservations (especially at tough-to-book restaurants, as Maitre d’s often lie about booking to make hot spots seem even hotter), and you’ve got the restaurant site trifecta. Foodies of the web, place your bets.