Manifold Motion's Miscellenea II Wraps Up Tonight
Around The -Ists This Week
Seattlest Pix 09Nov24
Seattlest Pix 09Nov23
Can't Miss It: Monday
Ethan Lowry emailed us recently announcing a restaurant guide he's been developing. We hate restaurant guides, but in our haste to delete the email we clicked on the link he sent. Turns out that this one called Urbanspoon doesn't suck.
We tried specifically looking for information on the restaurant Ebb 'N Flow, which recently replaced the Jitterbug across the street from the Guild 45th. We first clicked on "Wallingford" from the Urbanspoon homepage and then located the restaurant in a box containing the most viewed restaurants in Wallingford. We're not the only ones who want to find out about this new place, apparently.
There are links to three reviews on the Ebb 'N Flow page, all of which turn out to contain little actual information. The P-I rambles on about the past restaurants that have been in the space for thirty five paragraphs before we quit on it. CitySearch rates it a promising 9.2 out of 10, but the blurb doesn't validate the high ranking: "Awash in a retro theme, this Wallingford spot serves dependable diner favorites all day." 9 out of 10 for dependable diner favorites? Lame. Finally, there's a link to the Stranger which offers an even smaller blurb but gives the place two "$" which ain't good for dependable favorites and is exactly why we never went to the place when it was the Jitterbug. The problem with all of those reviews is that they each come from places that hope to be your restaurant gateway themselves.
We think you should review restaurants or you should organize restaurants - If you try to do both you'll suck at either. Witness CitySearch: 9.2 out of 10 for a yuppified diner, but if we don't like that we Might Also Consider Kabul Afghan Cuisine. Yeah, that's exactly what we were looking for. Urbanspoon offers no official edititorial opinion on Ebb N' Flow and displays no business ties to any restaurants. They do offer you a straight-forward path to information on where things are and what other people thought of them.
Each restaurant listing at Urbanspoon allows you to vote on the establishment via a simple "I Like it," "I don't" either/or. You can also add a link to your own review of the restaurant to the page, although the mechanism for doing that is a little weird and involves adding some Urbanspoon HTML to your post or article. Thirty-six people have voted on Ebb N' Flow at Urbanspoon, and 58% liked it. Now, we know that a person is smart and people are stupid, but 58% is hard to ignore and seems a lot more likely to reflect reality than CitySearch's 9.2. We'll skip Ebb N' Flow.
Urbanspoon does have a few more advanced features if you submit to creating a username on the site. You can create wishlists of restaurants that you'd like to visit (link to it in your dating profile at Consumating or eHarmony or wherever?) and see a list of all the restaurants you've voted on. The single coolest feature is also probably the simplest: "Dinner and a movie" lists all the restaurants near each movie theater in town in order of proximity. Despite being directly across the street, Ebb N' Flow is only the third closest restaurant to the Guild 45th theater and the site shows approximately 15,000 other restaurants within a half mile so we're pretty sure we'll be able to find something better.
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Don't quite understand your enthusiasm for this site. Make a database of restaurants, check. Link to everybody else's reviews, check. Allow comments from people who may or may not know what they're talking about, check.
Interestingly, the first restaurant that popped up in my search? Closed about a year ago.
This has been done to death. But it's new and not connected to any "old media," so it must be cool, huh?
I'm sure Thierry Rautureau will be thrilled that Rover's is the "most popular" restaurant in Seattle. Patently bogus, as he's lucky to be in the top 50 of "popularity." (Most popular/highest agrossing: Salty's, Space Needle, Ray's ...)
Big diff between how non-patrons and regulars view a restaurant; a lot of conventional wisdom is hearsay. Clearly a lot of folks have heard that Rovers and Lark are "good," so they check off that box on the Zagat guide.
My personal view: no one gets to review a place (or vote on one) unless they've personally eaten there and paid for the meal themselves within, say, the previous year.
That said, Ethan's got a good idea, especially the menu links. And the blog links, duh.
This site is interesting but I still like Yelp.com a lot more. The reviews are much better on Yelp and the people are a lot funnier! Yelp is the best restaurant guide in Seattle by far - Sorry UFNS.