Being in a new city was always quite a food adventure and often not in a good sense. I wouldn’t be able to count on my fingers the number of times I landed in a touristy restaurant with repulsive food that cost me double the price. These times are gone. And gone for good.
Yesterday, we started discussing on where to have dinner. Every single person sitting at the table took out their phone and checked on their preferred app which restaurants had best reviews and scores. “Gowalla says there is a really good Indian restaurant around here”, someone said. “I’d rather have Mexican. Oh look, Foursquare says that the Mexican restaurant just a few feet away from here is great too.“ “OK, let’s do that then”. And we were off.
Why not ask a local for recommendation, you might think? Well, if you think about it, we did ask a “local”. Even better, we asked many locals who visited the restaurant, ate there and had a certain experience with the place. Why trust an opinion of one if you can trust an opinion of the many, right? Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and TripAdvisor are just a few examples of apps that let customers find, locate and review bars and restaurants, allowing them to become a food critic and as a consequence, determine which is the best restaurant in town. As Guy Kawasaki said in his #enchantment speech: “It’s the public who decides whether a product is great”. And it’s the mobile device that delivers it.