Restaurant Review Sites

TastingMenu was another great website like the ones we have visited in the past. It was well organized and seemed to be professionally finished. Even the tabs towards the top of the blog were illustrated with picture icons that matched with the tabs. Just from looking at this blog, I knew I was going to like it. Another point that I noticed was that there weren't that many advertisements whereas some of the blogs we've visited in the past have had a flurry of ads. In total, TastingMenu had only two ads, one on the side and one at the bottom of the column on the right. The authors also included vivid images of the foods they were describing which is always a plus! This blog is shared by two writers and purposely contains two perspectives: "behind the plate and behind the stove." Hillel is a professional eater and Dana is an "up and coming" professional chef. Overall this blog achieved in drawing me in to read the blog posts.

The first thing that caught my eye when I browsed through Atlanta Foodies were all the "cool" links or sites. It seemed to be filled with those links. Other than that the blog posts contained mostly recipes for foods rather than restaurant reviews. I only found one solid review of a restaurant that was posted on July 2nd of this year (quite a while back). Most the so called reviews described very briefly the restaurants and foods, and did not go into much detail like TastingMenu did. Atlanta Foodies had many ads on the side as you scrolled down, which can be very distracting to the reader.

One of the pros of Yelp is that anybody could write a review on any place they wanted including restaurants, stores, home services, and even more. However this website did not seemed to be focused on restaurants at all which ruined my image of this website. I went further into the websites to see what kind of reviews were posted on the restaurants and chose the number one rated restaurant. To my surprise there were many detailed reviews written by ordinary people, but just as I thought there were many brief comments about the restaurant as well. Yelp also shows where the restaurant is on a map for readers to find which is very helpful. On TastingMenu, some bloggers commented how the author did not post the address of the restaurant the author had reviewed and how it annoyed them greatly. Yelp disproved my first impression on the site, and proved itself to be quite useful.