Restaurant Discovery App Dish.fm Becomes A “Best Dish” Search Engine In Over 850 Cities Worldwide

Dish.fm, the recently relaunched restaurant
recommendation app which focuses on the best menu
items, as opposed to overall venue reviews, is today
rolling out an update which expands the service into
more of a dish search engine than local utility. The
company had previously allowed you to see the best dishes nearby and compare dishes inside a
restaurant, but now the app also helps you find the
best dish (e.g., steak, tiramisu, pizza, etc.) anywhere
– whether that’s 10 minutes away, in your city, or
even elsewhere in the world. When the startup had originally launched, it had gone
the “Foodspotting” route, which had it relying on
crowdsourced photos and reviews. Following the
app’s overhaul, which debuted this past December,
the new focus has been on building on top of
established content from sources like Yelp, Foursquare and Instagram. In order to determine the
best dishes around, Dish.fm analyzes public reviews
and tips found across the web, extracts those, and
counts each positive review as a “like” within its
application. With today’s update, that functionality has been
expanded, now allowing users to search for favorite
foods, drinks or desserts anywhere they want, using a
slider at the bottom of the app’s homescreen which
can be set to anything from 0.1 miles to 15 miles to
search closer to home. Or, if you’re planning a trip, for instance, a new search interface lets you search for
both dishes or restaurants by name in another city,
and display these on map or within Dish.fm’s now
cleaner, visual interface featuring photos of the items
in question. The app has also added key details like the
restaurant’s hours, directions and phone number, and
has updated user profiles to rank dishes by the date
reviewed, so it can serve as a diary of your favorite
meals. When Dish.fm relaunched in December, it supported
just two cities ( New York and San Francisco) with a
total of 3 million reviews analyzed. In March, the
company added 13 more cities, and today it has 865
cities on board, with over 8 million reviews analyzed,
as well as 8 million plus photos. Over a million of the app’s dishes have votes – meaning users have said
the item is “awesome” or “awful.” In tests, resetting the city to somewhere else in the
world outside of your own, was still a little buggy – a
couple of time after making the switch and tapping
the results, the app would still show my last searches
on the screen. But an additional attempt would correct
the problem, so it seems like there might be a couple of bugs left to squash. (Your mileage, as they say,
may vary.) The updated version of Dish.fm, available for iPhone
and iPad, is available now here on the Apple App
Store.