foodha for thought - menuism blog

Your marriage proposal left something to be desired. You can’t remember the last time you told your mother that you loved her. Hey, you’re just not good with emotions. So how can you write a restaurant review that says how you really feel?

Abandon the Obvious. Start by ending your love affair with words like good, delicious, and perfect. They’re the comfort blankets of the English language and you’re all grown up now. You don’t need to be a foodie to know what you’re tasting. Remember it. Was it crispy? Was it soft on the inside? Did it have a sweet aftertaste?

Take Pictures. Pictures will jolt your memory and fill in the gaps in your description. Plus, everyone loves a little smutty food porn. Take these examples.

A photo by justin wickedly labeled, “All You Can Eat”. From Tadashi Sushi.

A burrito for a small army from Sandiago’s Mexican Grill. Photo by fattiusthebear.

Write about the Interesting and Funny. Was there a fire in the kitchen? Were the men sitting one table over squabbling over their golf game? These things are all part of the dining experience. If it really stood out in your memory, write about it.

Don’t Hide Your Personality. Some of us can do the whole swirl, sniff and slurp wine tasting without giggling, and some of us can’t. So what if you don’t write for Gourmet magazine? There are still countless numbers of people who want to read about your opinion. After all, that’s why they’re visiting a public restaurant review site.

Re-Read Your Review. After you’ve finished, take a moment to look back. Check for typos that make you look silly. Try to read it from the point of view of a stranger: would you be captivated by what you’re reading? Would you find it useful? Would you give yourself an A? Tweak as necessary.

Menuism Users Show You How It’s Done
Or, select words from the superstars.

Rayvenhaus
Motto: Searching the bounty main for the best restaurants!
Best Trait: His honesty results in laugh-out-loud reviews. He also brings in personal experience. “I’ve slopped food in cleaner pig troughs then the bathroom at this restaurant.” (Taco Bell, Lynwood)
Memorable quotes: “I’m telling you what, I love the service at this place. I think next time I’ll try one of their Subs in a Tub.”(Jersey Mike’s Subs)

trufflupagus
Best Trait: Her far-reaching vocabulary: not surprising, considering she’s a professional writer (and photographer). She describes the Mexican Bloody Mary at Café Colonial as “a mix of vodka and tequila with perfectly piquant tomato juice and spices.” And she makes the Shrimp al Ajillo at El Faro sound like a Biblical experience. “A terrific rendition of this incredible classic – small shrimp, bubbling in a clay casserole filled with hot sauce and an immense amount of garlic…” Want some yet?
Memorable Quotes: “You have to be a super-hardcore capsaicin addict to tango with these peppers.” (Spicy & Tasty)

tommers
Motto: The deliciousness is in the details!
Best Trait: He merrily foodies his way from start to finish: his four visits to the Three Seasons Restaurant in Palo Alto cumulated in an 811-word review. Skip a sentence and you’ll be missing out on gourmet-ing vicariously. But he’s no grumpy food critic: in his hundreds of words, you’ll be loath to find any more critical than “wasn’t great.”
Memorable Quotes: Worth noting are his epic struggles with the limiting star rating system. About Saha he writes, “Four stars, just barely”; with AUX Delices, it’s “Four stars going on five?”. But the best may be his happy response to the EOS Restaurant & Wine Bar: “Hot damn! What a great meal!”

My job involves looking at hundreds of restaurant websites. As multiple tabs gather on my Firefox, I mildly worry that an animated chef doing the polka might show up in my dreams. Restaurant websites are a recipe for disaster, as owners are notoriously tight-fisted and their website designer is often the lowest bidder.
At a recent conference I attended for restaurant owners and managers, a speaker said, “You have to get into the twenty-first century with a website for your business.” The bad news is that owners are listening. Here are some things that that will send your potential customers lunging for the X in the corner of the screen.

Overenthusiastic Use of Multimedia: I’ve seen sites that have buttons that squeal, squeak, or moan every time a mouse runs over them and animated knives that sharpen themselves as a transition to every page.Too often, the multimedia takes the place of actual content; it’s these sorts of sites that have the most “Under Construction” pages – a good segue to the next point.
Serious Offender: Gregoire’s Restaurant . The links are swirling images that I can’t identify, but they look suspiciously like rounded coffins. Move your mouse and out pops the name of the link in a seedy-looking font. Are we meant to be surprised or terrified?

The Under Construction Page: If a page doesn’t exist yet, don’t link to it. There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking on a link that promises information but doesn’t deliver.
Serious Offender: Burrito Boyz . If I were an investor trying to get that ball rolling by clicking on “Invest”, I’d be greeted with a sadly pixelated Under Construction image. Bad news. Anyway, did I say nothing’s more frustrating than the under construction page? That’s a lie. Take the next point, for instance.

Playing Hide-and-Seek: Your potential customer shouldn’t have to hunt for your address, phone number, or other contact information. Put these things on the front page.

Manager in a Fortress: Hey, Rapunzel? If your customer had an especially good or bad experience (okay, most likely bad) she’s going to want to e-mail the owner or manager. Either post your e-mail address or create a feedback form. You can’t placate an angry customer who can’t reach you.
Serious Offender: Bob Chinn. if you’d like, you can read his entire biography, and you can even sign up to have him send you e-mails, but your chance of reaching him is slim to none unless you hire a private detective.

Music: Sorry, Beethoven; vocal website are so Web 1.0, and for good reason. The person doing dinner sleuthing at work will be given away by a burst of music to annoy the coworkers; another person already listening to music will be treated to an unpleasant remix. Play your favorite music at your restaurant; keep it off the internet.
Serious Offender: Katana. No one wants to buy your “Sounds of Katana” CD to “escape into a world of smoky sake, sexy candle-lit moment and luxurious beats” while they’re eating Bagel Bites.

The Orphaned Website: You can’t just slap your logo, address and menu onto a site and forget about it for months. Think of your website as your portfolio that needs continual updating. Post your specials every time they debut and display positive reviews as you receive them.

Thank goodness for Menuism, which will give you all the information you need with an interface that’s just as pretty as you please.

Yes, the day we’ve been waiting for all month is finally upon us! This week is National Pancake Week, and specifically, today is National Pancake Day, which you might know better as Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras.

To celebrate this wondrous day of fluffly, griddle-cooked batter, IHOP is giving away one free shortstack of pancakes today. More details here, and here are some quick links to find them in the following areas:

• Seattle
• Chicago
• New York
• San Francisco

What better way to celebrate National Pancake Week and participate in the ongoing Food Fight than by enjoying some free flapjacks? If plain buttermilk pancakes aren’t your thing, you can try lots of other specialty pancakes that users have already found. There are still lots of pancakes to eat (and reviews to write) for this Food Fight - get crackin’!

-John

Want to keep track of the latest reviews on Menuism? Try out using the RSS feeds. Keep your eye out for the RSS icon and add the link to your favorite RSS feed reader. At this time, we’ve got a few different feeds:

• All Reviews: If you want to know who’s eating what no matter where, grab this one: http://www.menuism.com/reviews/feed
• Cities: If you want to just keep track of what’s going on around your city, grab one of these. Some examples:
  • http://www.menuism.com/cities/US/IL/Chicago/reviews/feed
  • http://www.menuism.com/cities/US/WA/Seattle/reviews/feed
  • http://www.menuism.com/cities/US/CA/San+Francisco/reviews/feed
• Users: If you want to keep tabs on a particular user, grab the feed from their user page. For example, on my profile page, the RSS feed for all my reviews is: http://www.menuism.com/users/justin/reviews/feed
• Friends: If you just care about where your friends are eating, grab the feed link on your “Friends” page. For example, on my friends page the RSS feed for my friends is: http://www.menuism.com/users/justin/reviews/friends/feed

If you don’t have an RSS reader yet, here are few you can try:

• Bloglines: A web-based RSS reader
• My Yahoo!: The Yahoo! start page can include RSS feeds as a content module. More info here.
• Google Reader: Google’s version of a web-based RSS reader
• Vienna: (Mac) A downloadable RSS reader so you can sync your feeds then read them offline.
• Firefox: You can use the Firefox browser to keep track of RSS feeds through “live bookmarks”. Menuism also looks better if you use Firefox or Camino (on Mac).
• More top feed readers here

Here’s Feedburner’s Feeds 101 guide if you want to read more about RSS feeds.

Go grab a feed to keep up on the food!

Leave a comment if you have a RSS reader recommendation for others or an RSS suggestion.
Justin

Quick Reminder: Write reviews to enter the end of month t-shirt drawing!

At the end of the month, we’ll be giving away a free Menuism t-shirt to one of Foodha’s Picks. If you haven’t noticed yet, Foodha randomly picks a top tipped review over the past 30 days to display on the front page (since he likes food so much, the review has to include a review of the food). On January 1st, we’ll load up the front page of Menuism and see who the random winner is (excluding John and Justin of course - we already have shirts :P).

Right now, the users that look to be in the running are:

• Shaomai
• Mandeelish
• Mirabell_19

If you don’t want to write reviews but you want a t-shirt, then buy one at the Menuism Shop. We also have dark gray hoodies now too, but they aren’t up on the page yet. Send us an email if you want one of those.

Some tips on getting tipped:

• After you write a review, click on the “Share” link on the review confirmation page to send it to your friends or the people you dined with. Tell them to join to tip you!
• Invite your friends to join the site so they can keep track of all your recent reviews.
• Good reviews don’t just mean reviews with high ratings. Make sure your review is useful, helpful, and/or entertaining.

If you enjoy the review, give it a tip! ‘Tis the season for giving afterall

Happy Eating,

Justin

Happy December to all you hungry readers! The new month brings lots of updates at Menuism (plus the huge backlog of blog posts about them), and one of the most exciting is the ability to upload your own profile image.

How do you do it? Just go to your user homepage and look for “Change Pic” under your current picture.

What about using Gravatar, you might ask? We were initially excited about using their simple service for user avatars, but technical issues on their side have closed off the service to new users. With all the great new users joining the site, we didn’t want everyone to wait any longer, so we chose to implement our own system. Maybe one day we’ll reconsider Gravatar, but our priority is to ensure a good experience for you, our loyal users.

We just added the image feature very recently and we’ve already seen great adoption by lots of users. It just takes a minute - if you haven’t uploaded an image yet, there’s no better time than now.

-John

If you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve added the ability to sign up and log into Menuism with your Yahoo! account. And we’re happy to say that since we implemented it on Oct 20th, we’ve had almost 70% of new users use the Yahoo Sign In approach. I hope that means people are finding it easy and useful.

Why?

• We think we’ve got a pretty cool service, but if people don’t signup then how can they get the full experience? The Yahoo! authentication lets people signup without having to create another username/password to remember and also ensures that it’s a person with a valid Yahoo account that’s signing up.
• Yahoo has more than 250 million users (from what I last saw) which means there’s quite a few people who are eligible to signup.

How do I use it to sign up?

1. Click on the big Yahoo! Sign In icon that my wonderful cousin Julia designed for us. Clicking on it will take you to Yahoo to sign in.

   

2. Sign into your Yahoo! account.
3. Click “Yes” to the agreement. After this, it will take you back to Menuism to finish the signup process.
4. Pick a screenname. Yahoo doesn’t send us your screenname, so you need to pick some kind of identification for the site.
5. Enter a valid email. Just in case we need to send you important account information. If you’re email is invalid and the signup email you send you bounces, we’ll invalidate your account (so use your real email).
6. Agree to the Terms of Use.
7. Done! Now everytime you want to sign into Menuism, just click on the Yahoo button and sign into your yahoo account when prompted (you’ll have to accept that agreement everytime) and you’ll automatically get signed into Menuism!

If you’ve signed up with the Yahoo Sign In and you don’t want to use it everytime, you can still set a password by going to “Edit Settings” on your home page. Now you can use your screenname and password to sign into Menuism which is a tad bit faster.
Questions

• Is this secure? Yes.
• Does Yahoo send any of my account information to Menuism? No. Yahoo doesn’t send us anything about you. All Yahoo tells us is “A user with a Yahoo account has successfully signed in and here’s a unique number you can use to identify him/her”.
• Do you send any information to Yahoo? No.

More Details For the Truly Curious

How did you do this? We used a cool new service that Yahoo made available called Yahoo BBAuth (Browser Based Authentication). We also leveraged a Ruby on Rails plugin that made the implementation rather smooth (Thanks Cameron!).

If you’ve got any more questions or have any problems, just send us some feedback or just leave a comment here.

-Justin

It’s been a really exciting week at the Menuism office (aka the garage). All the fantastic praise and feedback we’ve received keeps us hungry to make Menuism your best way to discover great food in your area, so thanks, and keep it up! We’ve had well over 100 new reviews in the past week, and lots of fantastic new users such as xuster, opilicious, shihnong and phatcat1688 contributing their wisdom and opinions to the community.

We want Menuism to be the best for YOU, so we added lots of ways to customize and shape the site to your benefit. One of the most powerful ways to do so is by tagging restaurants to make them easier for you and others to find later. We’ve already tagged a lot of them, but it’s your tags that really help make the site your own. Don’t know what to tag? Try tagging restaurants that are romantic or vegan, offer happy hour, or are Diner’s Club affiliated. Every tag helps! How useful is tagging? As an example, my former employer offers a discount card known as the Prime Card. Certain local restaurants offer good discounts to Prime Card holders, but it’s always hard to remember which ones. I took the liberty of tagging all the local participating restaurants with the tag “MS Prime”. So now Microsofties looking for a cheap meal can just search for “MS Prime” in the area and take their pick! You can check this out to see the results.

There are plenty of restaurants on the site that are waiting for your tags, so get to it!

-John

So here’s a fun little feature that we whipped up over the weekend – browsable top users list. Now you can see the highest tip givers and receivers.

Some Tip Reminders:

• Tips are what count, not points. So if you’ve been accumulating tons of points, find some good reviews to tip!
• You’ll get rewarded even more if you tip a good review rather than a bad one. How? When other people tip the same review you tipped, you get a fractional bonus (for your tips given total) – this can add up very fast for a good review. It’s sorta like buying into a hot stock really early.
• If you haven’t grasped the tip concept yet. Just think about tipping at a restaurant – you tip for good service. There are big tippers and big tip earners (those who provide great service). Everyone loves both kind of people, so we highlight them!

Here’s the link to check out the users list:

http://www.menuism.com/users

You can also browse by city (there’s a link under “Top Users” for every city page):

http://www.menuism.com/cities/Seattle/WA/users

Now you can see all the cool gravatar images people have been putting up! If you don’t have a pic yet, go to http://www.gravatar.com and create and acount with the same email address you used on menuism.com.

If you post any comments on the blog, use the same email address and your pic will also show up here (same goes for any other blog that is Gravatar-enabled).

Question: Is the tips concept confusing? Any suggestions for clarifying it?

Enjoy!

- Justin