Foodspotting Makes Me Hungry

It's hard to really get what kind of food a place serves just by reading a Yelp or UrbanSpoon review. Sure, you can go to the restaurants website and look at some pictures, but it's not fast, and if McDonald's has taught me anything, it's taught me that food pictures from restaurants are a sham. The only real way for people to get a good idea of what they will be eating at a particular place is to see pictures taken by real people. Fortunately for us, there's an app for that.

Foodspotting is a complete user-contributed restaurant discovery app that uses pictures of food instead of written reviews. The main screen of the app lets you browse pictures of dishes from all the places around you, but you can easily switch the view to only show foods with the most number of "noms," Foodspotting's own "like" system. The noms, unlike other apps' ambiguous star ratings, only come from people who have earned enough reputation points to share their opinion. It may seem rigid, but it prevents corporate food from overrunning the system, something that I greatly appreciate.

From the main screen, you can easily switch to a search to find particular types of food, foods in different cities, or just a particular place. Or, you can dive into the Foodspotting's user-based guides that take you to people's favorite locations. The guides are mostly from random people, but there are many guides available from Food Network, Travel Channel (tons of Anthony Bourdain stuff), and Zagat.

If you are a fan of discovering new food and are a bit tired of baseless star ratings, pick up Foodspotting and start taking pictures. It's a free app, so go have some fun with it.

By the way, I've never been this hungry after writing an article. Those pictures are brutal.