Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
30 July 2003

ChefMoz is a clever idea but a little under-cooked at present. Looking at the London section it has 172 restaurants listed and categorised (out of c. 10,000 available restaurants) and just 24 reviews linked – the Paris entry has 226 entries and 31 reviews. The search engine is pretty limited in its ability to use the categories that have been input. Nonetheless, it is an idea that deserves to go far and I hope it gets developed a little more. If you want to know where to eat in, say, Afghanistan (where conventional restaurant guides may fail to cover you) dmoz may have the answer one day – right now it just has one review.

The main existing London restaurant guides I used to rely on online – Zagats, the Evening Standard and Time Out – all now charge to use them.

Thanks to Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka for the link

3 Comments

  1. Damn! I had this idea precisely 2 weeks ago as I was complaining about Vindigo to a friend. Seems as if the Hod creative brain missed out again 🙂

    Glad to see somebody’s doing it though. Must be a current meme. Good luck!

    Comment by hod — 1 August 2003 @ 11:28 am

  2. Actually, it’s been around for a couple of years – I’ve been an editor there since it’s conception (although I haven’t done any work recently and I think my login has now expired).

    The editing interface can be a bit difficult, but I’ve still managed to list 16 “restaurants” in Leicester. Ok, they aren’t the “best” restaurants, but it’s slightly harder to review them then you think – but sign up as an editor and give it a go!

    Comment by Richy C. — 3 August 2003 @ 2:57 am

  3. Open Griping

    A link from Blog.org points me to the ChefMoz site. ChefMoz is part of the open directory project. The idea behind Open Directory is that everyone can add reviews of restaurants, link to reviews published elsewhere, and generally share good information…

    Trackback by Too Many Chefs — 30 March 2004 @ 7:39 pm

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