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Internet Life recreation food and drink

Restaurants

  BY ALAN S. KAY   

Restaurant sites are a perfect example of the power of the Web: They distribute intensely local information globally. Restaurant pages, links, and guides fall into two categories: broad listings that encompass many kinds of restaurants and areas, and listings and evaluations specific to one type of restaurant or to one area. If the latter is your cup of tea--or steak frite or bowl of chili, for that matter--you'll want to check in with Web pages that are linked to guides to local dining.


John Troyer's Dining Out on the Web, maintained by Dan Whaley, will grab you immediately with its opening cartoon. But the true power of this site is its links to hundreds of restaurant guides, many of them country-, city-, or even neighborhood-specific! If you're looking for New York delis, seafood in Boston or Seattle, or that perfect Chicago steak, this is the place to start.

One of the better examples of a regional restaurant listing is the Bay Area Restaurant Guide. It's a compendium of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of almost 12,000 restaurants, with reviews of many of them attached. If you want to have your say, you can post your own opinions, be they raves or pans. This site offers on-line maps to let you zoom in anywhere in the San Francisco Bay area, and supports searches by name, city, and cuisine. Unfortunately, the reviews tend to be only one to three sentences, and most don't include hours or details such as decor, but this is a valuable resource nonetheless!

The best experts' reports we found were at Paul and Kay Henderson's Favourite Restaurants. For 17 years, Paul and Kay have owned Gidleigh Park, a small hotel and restaurant in Chagford, Devon, England. They clearly know whereof they speak, and this site links to chatty, personal descriptions of restaurants in London, the West of England, Scotland, Paris, Venice, and New York. You won't find any images here, but the writing is both entertaining and insightful. There's also a link to a fascinating page on great UK restaurant wine lists.


A la Carte Guide to North America listed over 400,000 North American restaurants on its colorful pages when we looked at it. You can click on any state in a map of the U.S., then search the statewide listings by city and/or cuisine. The listings are presented in large type against a textured background, making them a bit hard to scan. And no evaluations are offered; this site is essentially a telephone directory. You can, however, add or correct listings and submit your own reviews. This is a good starting point for a more comprehensive search or a memory-jogger.

Robb Satterwhite's Tokyo Food Page will delight the lover of sushi and other Japanese dishes. Read up on nabemono (Japanese stews), tempura, unagi (grilled eel), yakitori (grilled chicken), okonomiyaki (savory pancakes), and sushi vocabulary, then take a virtual visit to a Tokyo water bar. You'll find listings for African, Asian, and Thai restaurants throughout Japan and also cooking information, including a guide to Japanese markets in the U.S. In need of a sushi bar conversation starter? Check out the Sushi Multimedia Page, which will have you yearning for sushi in no time: Listen to audio clips of chopsticks being split and the rustle of nori (seaweed) as it's rolled into maki. The Sushi Color Swatches will help you coordinate your interiors with your favorite sushi varieties.

A Web presence would seem to be an obvious marketing move for restaurants wanting to cut down on incoming telephone calls and promote their menus, chefs, and special events. Surprisingly, few restaurants are on the Web, though we found a few. Mark Miller's Red Sage in Washington, D.C., offers a greeting from the hostess as well as pictures of some signature dishes. The Border Grill has an attractive home page that's the very model of a modern restaurant Web site. You'll find information about the chefs, recipes, a menu, and pictures of the restaurant itself. You can almost taste it!

Life can be tough for a vegetarian who's traveling or simply new to a given locale. The World Guide to Vegetarianism is a very thorough listing of vegetarian and vegetarian-friendly restaurants, stores, organizations, and services worldwide by locale. And the rec.food.veg World Guide to Vegetarianism is a home page front end to this Usenet listing, which is a plain-text compilation of brief listings of stores and restaurants of vegetarian interest by locale.
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If the Tokyo Food Page whets your appetite for sushi, point your browser toward the World Wide Sushi Restaurant Reference for listings of sushi restaurants discussed in the alt.food.sushi newsgroup. Listings here are by country, and some reviews are available. The page is intentionally put together without graphics to allow it to load faster. Readers can add comments about sushi bars they've tried. 3.0

Aside from being a great source of information on Acadiana and the music, food, and culture of New Orleans, Gumbo links to a list of great New Orleans restaurants, including recommendations where to get the best po-boys in the Big Easy. Any site that recommends Anthony Uglesich's hole-in-the-wall place in the Garden District is OK in our book!

We found quite a few New York City restaurants on the Web, fitting for a great dining town. La Bouillabaisse is a Provencale restaurant in Brooklyn Heights. Browse a typical menu, read some recent reviews, and find out about serving hours and directions. And Nobu is a site devoted to Nobu Matsuhisa's much-discussed lower Manhattan restaurant. You'll find an interview with the famous chef, directions on proper sushi-eating etiquette, and find out which ploys will not get you seated next to Robert DeNiro or Cindy Crawford. You can find more at Clay Irving's New York City Reference Page, Restaurants, an interesting list, and The Dining Directory.
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If you're planning a trip to Paris, or just in need of an escapist moment, take a look at Le Cyber-Routard, which offers the names and addresses of user-recommended Parisian restaurants.

What are Hot Restaurants, you ask? Well, they're restaurants with some fire to them! This plain, unadorned page indexes restaurants mentioned in the Chile-Heads Digest. The listings are thin and uneven, but there're also links to searchable indexes of the Digest.

Sally's Place could develop into a useful source for restaurant information. At the moment, the listings are exhaustive for only a few locations (Marin County, California; Texas; and Oregon), and the reviewers don't venture too far out of San Francisco. But Sally Bernstein promises much, much more.

The Kosher Restaurant Database is a search form to a database. The listings seem spotty and could certainly use some more input.

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QUICK CLICK!
Dining Out on the Web

Bay Area Restaurant Guide

Paul and Kay Henderson's Favourite Restaurants

A la Carte Guide to North America

Tokyo Food Page

Red Sage

The Border Grill

World Guide to Vegetarianism

rec.food.veg World Guide to Vegetarianism

World Wide Sushi Restaurant Reference

Gumbo

La Bouillabaisse

Nobu

Clay Irving's New York City Reference Page, Restaurants

The Dining Directory

Le Cyber-Routard

Hot Restaurants

Sally's Place

The Kosher Restaurant Database