Question: What are your favorite tools for tracking restaurants you want to eat at?

[albertc44]

Hi mighty CHers, I am curious what applications people use to track their favorite restaurants they WANT TO EAT AT. This is an age-old problem that I have faced and after talking with a couple foodie friends, have realized there is no real good solution out there. Here is how I break down the problem:

Current solution: People read something on nymag.com, a popular foodie blog, or what have you, and add that restaurant to a Google spreadsheet, a Word document, or as a note on their notepad app on their phones. The beauty about Google spreadsheets is that you can share it with your friends and add as many columns of data as you want.

Better solutions: A few of my more technologically-advanced friends use things like Yelp Bookmarks to track the restaurants they want to eat at after reading a review about a given restaurant, for instance. I did this for a while but then the list got too long and I couldn't easily search for a restaurant. I also have friends who use the To-Do lists on FourSquare, but this is highly dependent on their friends also using the To-Do lists (only my friends from SF use FourSquare To-Do lists, interestingly). Finally, there are all these cool apps in the app store like Matchbook that let you quickly add your favorite places (not just restaurants) to help you remember where you want to go.

What features do you like about Yelp, Foursquare, etc. that let you manage the list of restaurants you want to try? I want to find a good solution that allows me to maintain a list, share it with friends easily, and make it easy to add on the fly. Thanks!

[chicgail]

I wonder if Pinterest would do it?

[HillJ]

Pinterest covers alot of subjects and is very similar to FourSquare.

[HillJ]

albertc44, how about following the restaurant via their Twitter account or the Twitter account of their patrons? Facebook accounts opened by the restaurant or food owner or customer fan base are full of information that is up to the minute, full of event announcements, menu photos, reviews and all the contact info you would need. I'd recommend going straight to the horses mouth as it were OR start a Twitter account of your own to store this handy info. that you can share with friends.

I'm not as much a fan of FB as I am of Twitter for this type of tracking but I would recommend researching the FB and/or Twitter accounts of your current favorites to see how far that gets you.

[albertc44]

That's an interesting idea, but I'm more concerned with managing my entire list of restaurants I want to eventually eat at. Right now I have over 50 restaurants in NYC I want to try, and not sure if following 50 Twitter accounts is the best way to do this.

[HillJ]

Good point about the # of Twitters but there are food review sites with established Twitter accounts that would streamline your plans. Most NYC sites have a Twitter account and individuals join them and share info.