When we go on vacation or leave for work, finding a place to eat well is not easy, especially if we don’t know the city. We can ask the local people for help, but the language is often an incapable obstacle. If we don’t want to end up eating in a fast food restaurant and eating the classic sandwich with chips, we can ask for help from technology.
Applications dedicated exclusively to restaurants are available on the Google Play Store and App Store: by entering the city we will be shown all the best places in the vicinity, with people’s reviews. In many cases the menu with prices is also available and we can understand if this is an expensive restaurant.
The restaurant apps are all free and work in a similar way. By entering the city we are visiting, we will be shown the list of the best restaurants in the city, but if we want to narrow the search and find a place in our vicinity, just activate the GPS and in the integrated map within the application we will see which are the restaurants around us.
You can hire a software development team to develop such apps for showing the best restaurants in the city, offer the possibility of booking and obtaining discounts. Here are the best applications to read restaurant reviews before you eat or order online:
TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor doesn’t need much introduction – it’s the world’s most popular service for hotel, bed & breakfast, restaurant and club reviews. But not only. It also allows us to compare hotel prices and book the one that best suits our needs. If we are on vacation and do not know where to eat, just launch the TripAdvisor application on our smartphone to see which restaurants are nearby.
For each restaurant there are reviews made by other users and photos of the dishes. Furthermore, there is also a rough indication of whether the restaurant is expensive. You can also outsource dedicated software development teams to get such an app developed for your region.
The Fork
The Fork is an application that allows you to book the restaurant directly from your smartphone. There are over 40,000 places available all over the world and 10,000 in Italy (Rome, Naples, Milan, Florence, Turin, Florence, Venice and in all the main Italian cities).
The GPS is activated, the app is launched and all the restaurants in the area will be shown on the smartphone screen. For each place there are user reviews, photos of the dishes and the menu. If a local has particularly convinced us, we can book by entering the date, arrival time and the number of people. In addition to the GPS search, we can also use the manual one: just enter the city you are visiting and a list with the best restaurants will be shown.
Yelp
Yelp has begun to be appreciated also in Europe and Italy. It is possible to find the restaurant both via the GPS and by carrying out a manual search by directly entering the city or the name of the restaurant.
The map will show all the restaurants in the vicinity and for each one we will be able to consult a card with reviews and photos taken by users. In addition, the opening and closing times are also available. It has over 100 million user-written reviews.
Foursquare
Foursquare is an application that is based on the tastes of users and shows all the bars and restaurants in the vicinity. Just enter the name of a product we like, to find out which places offer it.
When you arrive in a restaurant, from the Foursquare application you will be able to read the reviews of other users and find out which are the best dishes. The application offers the possibility to follow the advice of other users (as if it were a social network) and to go and eat in the places they have reviewed.
Zomato
Zomato is the food social network par excellence, where you can find reviews, information, menus, photos and prices of each place. Inside the App (also available in desktop version) the “collections” are constantly updated, articles in which various places are recommended grouped by a common theme (very useful when you are short of ideas or want to experiment).
A Zomato user owns a profile page, writes reviews, comments and likes reviews from their friends, shares photos and checks in to the places they visit. This application also acts like an On-Demand food delivery solution in India.
Groupon
At the time when there were only restaurant sites, the marketing possibilities exploited by them were minimal. They became “business cards” or digital brochures, a static page in which contacts, menus and little else appeared. Fortunately, the digital world has also evolved, bringing with it advances in all aspects: communication, promotion and management.
Quandoo
It is an app that is growing more and more globally, and every day it puts its users in contact with the best restaurants in the world thanks to an intelligent and customizable online table reservation system.
Users can search based on their tastes, their needs but also based on the budget they intend to spend on the meal. In fact, the Quandoo application allows you to filter restaurants based on the area, the type of cuisine, the score obtained from the reviews left by those who have already been there and also based on the price.
OpenTable
This app is perfect for those who are abroad and need to book a table at a restaurant without calling directly. It includes almost 50 thousand local restaurants in the US, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, Germany, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands and other countries. Functional and simple to use, OpenTable is available in English for iPhone and Android.
Facebook
Facebook has started to make the stars appear under the name of the restaurant page. The stars, from 1 to 5, form the average of the reviews received by the page in the “Reviews” box. This last box was actually present for some time, but the real novelty was to see the stars and the “Vote” button appear, later transformed into “Recommend” or “Tell people what you think”. This way, the user can still leave the review of the restaurant he visited. In reality, many of the reviews are probably left from mobile devices. In fact, the mobile logins to Facebook have now exceeded those from the desktop as the layout of the page highlights the box more and calls the user to action.
Google Assistant
The Google Assistant also helps you find the best restaurants nearby. With Android you just need to call the function OK, Google , the same goes for an iPhone, but you will need to have the Google app installed.
If you try to search for a restaurant on Google, you’ll see a prominent panel appear on the first page of search results (even before paid ads). This tab lists the restaurants that have registered their profile on Google My Business and where you can find Address and directions, Contact by phone or social, Website, Reviews by users, Opening time, Photographs of the products and the shop, etc. The reviews given by people who visited the restaurant play an important role in deciding whether you should dine or order food from that restaurant.