Seattlest Interview: Ethan Lowry of Urbanspoon.com

In December we wrote about local restaurant review site Urbanspoon. We loved it then, we love it now, and we've been loving it in the interim. Since we last chatted with Ethan Lowry, one of the three brains behind the site, Urbanspoon has really fleshed things out and branched out to a bunch of other cities.

Are you a food guy or a tech guy? What's your background?

I've been eating since I was born, but I've only been in high-tech for the past dozen years or so, so I think that makes me a food guy. Also as much as I enjoy writing code, give me a nice slice of pizza or some foie gras and I'm in heaven. I studied product design, and have been working on various tech start-ups since I got out of school, mostly here in Seattle (drugstore.com, Avogadro, Jobster). Patrick and Adam are both true techies and much smarter than I am.

Describe the birth of Urbanspoon.

Urbanspoon got started by accident. Adam and I decided to make a company with the mantra "Dream Small". We'd both done the whole "get big quick" venture capital start up thing, and we wanted to see what we could build with just a couple of guys and very little money. Urbanspoon was our first experiment, chosen because we like eating out and we were frustrated with the restaurant sites already online. For the first few months we kept saying, "just another week on Urbanspoon, then we'll do something serious."

Why? Isn't there already a Yelp and a Cityguide before that and a Zagat before that? It's a crowded field; what was missing?

We show restaurant reviews from all the professional critics -- the Times, the PI, the Stranger, Seattle Weekly -- as well as reviews by food bloggers who eat out almost as often and write almost as much. We also let you see what restaurants your friends like, and don't. So for me, it's all of the opinions I care about in one place. No one else has done this for restaurants, though sites like Rotten Tomatoes and MetaCritic do for movies. I think by really focusing on restaurants we were able to solve this better than anyone else has done.

Do you have employees? I know it's a 'user-generated content' type of deal but it seems like there was a huge amount of legwork done to aggregate all the MSM reviews and blog posts about various restaurants. Who did that?

We don't have employees, just the three of us. Well, our wives and some friends pitch in and help. We've had to work very, very hard to get our technology to do most of the work so that we can bring up a new city quickly. But really, the user-generated content thing works!

This isn't the kind of work that generally comes out of Seattle. You're from the Valley aren't you? You probably live there now, masquerading as a Seattle resident...

We're local, you should come by! We're in Eastlake, we eat at Daly's or Le Fournil almost every day, or Agua Verde if it's sunny. I admit, Patrick was born in the Bay Area, Adam used to work in Palo Alto and I went to school down there. But we're all loyal Seattlites (Seattlests?) now.

What's your favorite place to eat in Seattle?

Have you tried Skillet? It's a kitchen in the back of an Airstream trailer, and you need GPS to figure out where they're located. But they make a burger topped with "bacon jam". You'll weep. Of course, there's nowhere to sit since it's parked on the street. For a candle-lit dinner for two, I love Cafe Juanita. [Ed Note: Skillet is closed!]