Amazon Restaurants Beta
Found this at Metafilter:
Amazon has posted thousands of scanned, OCRed menus from restaurants in six U.S. cities and made them available at Amazon.com Restaurants, where users can make reservations and post reviews. They've got a few of my favorite places in NYC :)
Anybody want to suggest some good eats in New York? Boston? San Francisco? Send me an email and I'll put it up, or post a comment!
Comments
As a couple of MeFi commentators noted, the menus seem to have been collected without the participation of the restaurants and should be presumed out-of-date (as apparently at least one definitely is). Better check with the restaurant before getting your heart set on a possibly seasonal item!
Posted by: steve | May 30, 2002 03:26 PM
Good point - the MeFi comments also point out a few other sites that are doing this, but I'll be interested to see what happens here. If this goes beyond Beta I'm pretty sure they'll use up-to-date menus :)
Posted by: Songdog | May 30, 2002 03:30 PM
Come on, loyal readers! Don't any of you have any recommendations to share? Anyone? Is anyone out there? Hellloooooo ...
Posted by: Songdog | June 3, 2002 01:55 PM
Maybe if you narrowed the request down a little? I wouldn't even know where to start recommending places in NYC. (Or Boston or SF either, but that's the opposite problem...)
I mean, Chowhound has entire message boards devoted to the topic!
Posted by: steve | June 3, 2002 03:46 PM
Fair enough. I'm not just looking for recommended restaurants; I'm looking for people's particular favorite places. And I'm not looking for just anyone's particular favorites, I'm looking for Songdog.net readers' particular favorites ... unless they'd rather not risk contributing to their popularity by using their True Names ;) I posted Victor's Cafe and Hunan Park because they're both places that I especially love going back to.
The other implicit criteria is that they must have online menus from Amazon.com Restaurants Beta, because I like the idea of making the actual menus browsable and searchable online, but that criteria could be waived for the right restaurant...
Posted by: Songdog | June 3, 2002 03:55 PM
Well, I doubt either of these restaurants has menus at Amazon beta (actually, do they have more than four?), but on the other hand they're fabulous lunch places within an easy walk of Bryant Park, so I trust you'll accept them:
Katsuhama, 11 E. 47th St.
(great pork cutlets!)
Gan Eden, 74 W. 47th St.
(great Uzbek food, and a palindromic address!)
Posted by: steve | June 3, 2002 04:19 PM
Thanks for the recommendations, Steve! Gan Eden isn't in there, but they have got a listing for Katsuhama (sans menu).
By the way, did you notice that they're soliciting menu submissions? Good luck getting the customers to do the legwork and research.
Posted by: Songdog | June 3, 2002 04:27 PM