Chewsy Tells Us What We Really Want to Know: What’s Good to Eat Nearby
My most frequent use of location-based apps like Foursquare and Yelp is to look up reviews of what’s the most awesome dish to order at a restaurant.
The iPhone app Chewsy drills down on that problem specifically, and is a bit more useful in that it shows the best dishes at all the venues in a neighborhood before you pick where to eat.
Chewsy co-founder Chaitanya Sareen cutely calls this “the last-mile problem of restaurants.”
Chewsy, which today put out a new version with social sharing features, has a view of the top-rated dishes nearby, with pictures, ratings and reviews. (This is marginally different from competitor Foodspotting, which focuses primarily on pictures of food and doesn’t really have ratings or reviews.)
The problem is, Chewsy is far less widely used than many other location-based social and reviews sites. With only 50,000 users, very few dishes are even covered. And while folks like Foursquare might not be mainstream yet, they have mindshare and deep pockets; Foursquare just announced $50 million in new funding today.
Chewsy is actually a side project, though; the co-founders have day jobs at Microsoft. And for the record, they thought the egg sandwich at my local cafe was kind of bland.
