I like Yelp, the site that crowdsources people’s opinions and gives ratings on restaurants, stores and service businesses. I also have the Yelp application on my iPhone. I don’t use either one of them much at home, because I pretty much know which restaurants I like and where they are.
But I’m in Seattle this week for SAS Global Forum, our annual user conference. Yesterday morning I decided to use Yelp to find a place for breakfast. “Eating at the hotel restaurant always feels a bit like giving up.” So I opened the Yelp app, selected Restaurants as my category “they have lots more categories too, like Banks, Gas & Service Stations, Drugstores, etc.” and filtered by price and walking distance. It also lets you filter by which places are open at the time you’re looking, which is obviously pretty useful.
I found a half dozen or so candidates, and picked a Spanish restaurant with great reviews called Andaluca, because I thought it would be fun to find out what a Spanish breakfast was like. I clicked on the Directions button, which opened Google Maps and showed me how to get there. Really cool.
Like so many of the coolest iPhone apps “TripIt, Layar and Foursquare”, Yelp really shows its value when you don’t know where you are or what’s good.
The restaurant turned out to be small and elegant, with a nice wait staff. And a breakfast menu exactly like the one in my hotel. What Yelp hadn’t told me was that it actually is a hotel restaurant itself, so it’s Spanish at night and generic ‘Mercan in the morning. I had a chicken sausage hash with poached eggs. Tasty, but I doubt that’s what they were eating in Madrid that morning.
I won’t blame that on Yelp, though. But I did go in and leave a quick tip on Andaluca’s Yelp page that said, “Nothing Spanish about the breakfast menu.”