Kentucky GRILLED Chicken?

Are you kidding me?

This is Dunkin Donuts all over again

Quotation Mark Overload

IMG_0242.JPG
Originally uploaded by frivmo

This huge sign on the front of recently-opened Pret a Manger on 6th Avenue and 47th Street, is nothing short of a typographical travesty. It also fails miserably from both a marketing and a linguistic standpoint.

But a sign doesn’t a restaurant make, right? How is the food?

‘Good.’

Signs Around Town: NYC

What does this even mean?

Did someone sue them saying, “Yo, now look here Miss Manager Sir. I bought this Big Mac Extra Value Meal and now there ain’t any seats for me to sit down and eat. I’m gonna sue your ass for making me think I could sit down, when really this restaurant is clogged up with a bunch of stupid skinny-ass high school girls from Alabama on the dance squad for the Thanksgiving Day Parade who ain’t even eating for crying out loud! Hell, maybe I can prove I was hit by a car while trying to cross the street and dig into my box of fries at the same time because of your negligence to provide seating or notification of its lack so I might prepare otherwise.”

And then they had to pay a couple million in damages?

Or is this just pre-emptive?

Mission: Semi-possible

Project Codename: eatnyc
(Any name suggestions? If I pick yours - you can win free dinner!)

Progress

Seemingly endless data entry on my urban restaurant search application is underway and moving along at a clip. Or something like that.

The link above shows a table of my current data. Once the first main phase of data entry is complete, efforts will be shifted toward displaying the data simply in several linked HTML pages, each with a different sorting method (street, alphanumerical, cuisine), and then obtaining more information for each restaurant (phone, URL, price). Later, when the data is relatively complete, I will focus on creating a dynamic framework for it to all sit on using, most likely, Ruby on Rails. Gradually, I will be developing a design for the site, and will focus on making the interface clean, easy-to-use, and free from lots of scary ads and information stealing your eyes away from the task at hand. It should be super simple to find what you are looking for. Super simple. Once the site is up and running full-out, the next step is slowly supplementing the data with more listings, adding some other functionality and methods of visualization, integrating Google Maps, perhaps, or developing an NYC-specific mapping “thing” best suited to visualizing the results by street.

I am shooting for finishing the data entry by Thanksgiving. After that, it will be a long, slow, uphill crawl that requires me to learn a server-side language from scratch. But it will be a super-exciting crawl, though. And a crawl with delicious food at the end of it.

One thing is certain at this point in the process, and that is this: No matter what happens, I, at least, will know where all the restaurants in NYC are located. That ain’t bad. Nope, nope, nope.

Going For It

After yesterday’s post about the pain of searching for restaurants, I have done a little checking around, and a little soul-searching of sorts, and have decided I am going to attempt to make this application myself. It is going to be a ton of work. Between populating the database with thousands of restaurants and learning Ruby on Rails enough to make it work, I am going to have my hands (mouth?) full for a long time coming. But something tells me that this would be genuinely useful for a lot of people in New York City. This is definitely going to be a learning process for me, and it is going to grow very gradually. Taking inspiration from 37Signals’ Getting Real philosophy, I will first focus on making it work at a very basic level before worry about adding all sorts of extra functionality. First and foremost, it needs to list restaurants by street name. Later - much later - ratings, comments, menus, pictures, and more can be added. But I want to be careful not to overload. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other restaurant sites offering these features. What makes my application “special” is the ability to easily find a list of restaurants by street name/number. Making this feature work flawlessly is the number one priority. After that, it’s all icing.

Sometime later today I will try to post the beginning of my list in simple HTML, and keep updating that until I am able to do the real coding. If you are at all interested in helping with the research/implementation, leave a comment and we can roll on this.

I am terribly excited and motivated to make this work. And also a bit frightened. There is no rush to finish, though, so I’ll be able to give this the time it will need. And really, worse case scenario, it will fail, and I will have learned a damn lot along the way.

If you have any thoughts at all about this, please share them with me, particularly if you live/dine in NYC. What do you want from a restaurant search service? What annoys you about other sites? What else? What should it be called?

EDIT: List

Restaurant Search

Why is it so hard to search for restaurants online?

Unless you know the name of it (and even then it can be tough), you are stuck browsing through listings based on cuisine, price, and general distance from some address you enter. In New York, you can usually search by neighborhood, but this can sometimes be more trouble than it is worth. Using a service like Yahoo Maps can show you restaurants in the vicinity of your search, but the listings are far from complete, and don’t make it easy.

Googling for “restaurants near (or on) such-and-such street” doesn’t do much good either.

What I want to be able to do (and I suspect others might want, as well) is find a simple list of restaurants in a precise geographical area. For example, if I know I’m going to be on 23rd street for a meeting, I want to know all of the restaurants on that street. It would be nice, of course, to have the option to order the results by rating, or price, or cuisine, or whatever, but ultimately, I just want to know what restaurants are on that street.

Alternatively, what about times when you are walking around the city and see a restaurant that looks awesome, and you vow to return, only to get home and realize you have absolutely no idea what it was called? As it stands now, your only hope is to try to search for restaurants in the general area and browse through page after ad-filled page of junk that is meant to be browsed through with a different intent. If you’ve never tried to do this, let me just say, “It is hard.” More often than not, I remember what street I was on, or roughly, anyway. I sure as hell don’t know any real addresses, though. And how nice would it be to just see a list of restaurants in the order you’d see them walking down the street? Just simple text links to more information about the restaurants (where then you can display all the other fancy stuff like ratings and comments) ordered by location.

Something like this, of course, would be most helpful (practical) in big cities like Manhattan where one will be walking to these restaurants more often than driving. Further, creating something like this would take considerable physical exploration of the area, but could also be developed with help from others who may submit restaurants they know about.

I would love for something like this to exist, and almost want to make it myself, but I’m honestly not sure it’s something I could handle all aspects of. Maybe someone out there will hear this and get started, or maybe we could put some heads together and get something like this started. Perhaps it is something that could begin with accumulating data from other online listings and arranging it by street. Then the real field research could begin to supplement the current listings and we could start to collect data from users. Man, the more I write and think about this, the more I actually want to do it.

Is this something you would use if it existed for your city? Or am I just crazy?

Perhaps the most important question: Has someone already made this?

The Butter Trough

Eat. Drink. Free. Come on down and see the worlds First 100% Advertisement Supported Restaurant.

This is The Butter Trough, located in Atlanta, GA, whose offerings include a multitude of bread products, freshly made sweet tea, and, of course, butter - hot, melty butter. The best part - it's all free, thanks to the support of advertisers in the Atlanta area, whose pitches surround your dining experience in the form of speakers, television sets and multimedia displays scattered throughout the restaurant.

Sounds great, but is it real?

My first instincts tell me it's not, before any Googling at all. (Wait, sorry Google. I mean searching on Google.) Why? Well, there're some Ads by Google for starters. That's not normal for a business. It almost makes sense, though, as they claim to be advertisement-supported. Wait, I mean Advertisement Supported, sans hyphen. A mistake already? In the second line of text on the site? Hmm. Fishy. And "worlds"? And inconsistent capitalization in what seems to be their call-line? Not looking good, folks. We might not ever get that sumptuous, free butter after all.

The image on the main page (as well as the ones on subsequent pages) looks like a stock photo - and pretty low quality, as though the designer just downloaded the comp image without paying. Sure, lots of people do this, and maybe the company is so small they don't know any better - but...seriously? They can't afford a disposable camera to take a picture of the restaurant? They're located in Atlanta and can't find a friend or relative or advertiser even who would take a picture? Wouldn't their sponsors want to be on the website, too?

This is all to ignore the fact that The Butter Trough's site looks nothing like a restaurant website. Everybody knows the First Rule of Restaurant Web Presence, which is:

Thou shalt design your website in Flash.

But wait! You can buy merchandise for The Butter Trough on Cafe Press! That's legit, ain't it? Curious.

So with all this in mind, I did a simple Google Search (happy, guys?). First on the list is, happily, The Butter Trough's own website. That's pretty sweet for them. That is, it's sweet if anyone ever searches for "butter trough." I wonder how often that happens. Perhaps I should check my list of AOL Searches to see when I have some spare time.

Next, however, things turn bad for our prospects of free bread and butter and tea. The second result is a link to a page from the Museum of Hoaxes website. The author there feels the same way about the site, and has done some added research. She (or He) has done a Google Maps Search for the address (6346 Lynch Avenue), and it doesn't exist. This is backed up by a couple people who left comments.

And in what is arguably the most interesting development in this sequence of events, the author of the Museum of Hoaxes article says:

I'm guessing that the Butter Trough site was created by Joseph Donaldson, because a) Joseph Donaldson's homepage is hosted on the same server as The Butter Trough site and b) he links to the Butter Trough. A few other sites (all of which link to the Butter Trough as well) hosted on that server include: Circus of the Damned, and the Just Ducky Guild. (Thanks to Doug Nelson for the link)

Seriously, guys, you absolutely must check out those links. Starting with the first one. No fair skipping to the second or third. You've gotta do it in order. You'll regret it if you didn't.

The Butter Trough, sadly fictional, I can safely say, has somehow managed to become listed in several directories (including a list of restaurants near the Global Learning and Conference Center at Georgia Tech). Nice work, TBT. Now, if maybe you applied all your work designing and promoting a fake business to actually securing advertising support and turning your dream (and my dream, and many others' too) into a reality, we'd be getting somewhere.

Until then, I'll be working to figure out why the hell the New York Times pretended to publish an article about butter (but actually about trans fats) this week. Note: You must register with the NYT to view this, and do so soon, before it becomes archived. It's free until that happens.

To close, because this is becoming an epic "review" of a fake restaurant, I'll briefly touch on the concept of a 100% ad-supported restaurant. Is this even possible? Sure, and maybe it's actually the future. Spiral Frog sure hopes so.