Is an Online Zagat Required & Why?

With several restaurants mushrooming in each corner these days, choosing a good restaurant has been more than hectic. Diversity of food has no doubt brought in the world of fine and exotic cuisine. To get to a fine dining guide, you need to have excellent searching skills.

The likes of Zagat provide a consumer survey-based information on where to Eat, Drink, Stay and Play worldwide. They have ratings and reviews based on the opinions of over 300,000 surveyors from around the globe. Zagat is also the world's most trusted source to help consumers make informed decisions about restaurants, nightspots, hotels, attractions and other leisure activities.

Zagat enables savvy customers to make smart decisions for quality dining, travel and leisure activities and allows them to share their experiences. But how if there is one site where consumers can find all the restaurant reviews (professional and user), restaurant ratings from all the review sites, blogs and other social networks found on the web.

Coming up in this space of restaurant recommendations is a vertical search engine called BooRah. It provides consumers a smarter way to find great restaurants. BooRah's patent-pending natural language processing technology automatically summarizes a collection of online reviews from bloggers, professional critics and consumers; and allows consumers to search based on their personal preferences. Users can also find ratings on food, service, ambience and overall quality; address, hours, driving directions, maps, etc. for all local restaurants; a search feature allowing users to search by name, cuisine or location and also provides access to make online reservations. The restaurants directory also provides an easy way for users to post their own reviews of local restaurants.

The use of newer technologies like natural language processing has made the search for restaurants more intuitive. The search engine captures the community vibe and social essence of existing online groups by understanding the meaning of an individual's search criteria rather than a mere keyword based approach. This service helps consumers achieve their ideal dining experience by allowing them to search thousands of restaurants to meet their individual requirements. BooRah, the restaurant guide currently delivers pertinent information gathered from over a million online restaurant reviews in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and other metros.

In the greater San Francisco Bay Area, there are more than 15000 restaurants and Zagat carries ratings for about 10% of the restaurants. About half of the restaurants covered are in the City of San Francisco. So, if you are someone who lives in the sub-urban areas, it’s unlikely that Zagat has any ratings for restaurants in your neighborhood. On the other hand, Boorah has information that includes 1,000,000 Restaurant Reviews, 225,000 Restaurants, 45,000 Restaurant Menus, 30,000 Restaurant Pictures, 6,000 Discount coupons for various restaurants, 4,000 Restaurants with Online Reservation capability and more.

The fine dining guide BooRah generates the quality of ratings similar to Zagat without employing any editors. A scalable system covers the breadth of local search and generates the ratings to make the consumer experience a lot more desirable.

Zagat not just caters to web browsers, but also the Mobile users with advanced applications like ZAGAT TO GO for smart phones, and on the mobile web with ZAGAT.mobi. to find things on-the-go. Vertical mobile search applications have made the search for a restaurant guide smarter. Boorah, a restaurant search engine also provides a mobile restaurant review guide in partnership with 4INFO, a leading provider of SMS/ text messaging services. This guide provides a smarter way to find great restaurants throughout the San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and other metro areas.

BooRah extends its restaurant reviews and ratings via its Syndicated Reviews Platform to the mobile phone. BooRah sends reviews in an easy to read cell phone text message format after doing all the word crunching. Because user reviews are one the best ways to judge a restaurant, as “wisdom of crowd” matters and technology makes you get these reviews on-the-go.

If users can get something better than the likes of Yelp and Zagat that gives them all the restaurant information they need in one place, then users do need another online Zagat.

Finding a Restaurant to Host a Private Party

Partying is an essential ingredient in one’s social life. Every occasion in life calls for a celebration – Birthday, Graduation Day, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day and more. Choosing a good restaurant is very important to enjoy your party to the max.

Know how many people are attending the party. Decide on the choice of cuisine. Search restaurants using a restaurants directory or based on local restaurant reviews. Or search using a restaurant search engine like BooRah that’ll help to do half your party-planning in one go. Planning ahead and being organized is of course a must for any party.

Search restaurants that suit your social occasion with user-generated restaurant recommendations that Boorah automatically summarizes from a collection of online reviews from bloggers, professional critics and consumers. This allows consumers to search restaurants based on their personal preferences. They spruce up the search for good restaurants by capturing the community vibe and social essence of existing online groups, and comparing these results to an individual's search criteria; thereby delivering unsurpassed relevance with the broadest community reach.

BooRah’s semantic scoring engine analyses what people have written and generates specific scores for food, service and ambience from user sentiments. Users can check the reviews, menus online, view the food, discount restaurant gift certificates and coupons; get driving instructions and maps; get home delivery and also get details on online restaurant reservations. If it’s a private party that you want to host, the vertical search engine gathers information on private rooms as well. It’s very important to make your book your tables.

Always search for reviews where people have got excellent service, even in huge parties with good food, quick service, and a comfortable ambience. When it’s a private party, do check out if the private rooms have enough space to accommodate the whole of your party group. It’s actually best to ask for a private area to be partying. Also decide on whether you plan to party indoors or outdoors.

Choose a restaurant based on the number of guests attending, location for travelling convenience, cuisine, occasion, even the price tag matters. Book the restaurant for a time slot that’s convenient for all the guests who are attending. Check if you want to select a menu in advance or you are okay with your guests ordering based on their preferences.

Restaurant guides also help in doing quick online reservations and most of the times the private rooms get snapped up far too quickly. Avoid the last minute mad rush by having every detail and need taken care of. And when it’s party time, please don’t forget to carry your wallet and of course with a little extra (because you never know when you’ll end up ordering more).

Restaurants Need to be Judged by More Than Food

Restaurants are a part of the hospitality industry. Food is no doubt the main reason for a restaurants existence. But there is more to them than that – quick, pleasant service; comfortable and great ambiance. A restaurant might serve great food, but if the service is bad, that would be a competitive disadvantage. To have an increased future patronage, increased customer satisfaction is a necessity.

It all starts even before diners are at the table. Restaurant service needs to be pleasant even on the phone when people call for know the entire menu, hours of operation, directions on how to get to the restaurant from any part of the town. With restaurants having websites of their own, these sites need to speak all about their restaurant - ratings, cuisine type, menu, signature dish, decor description, hours of operation, price ranges, discounts and more.

Good food & sour service dampens the entire dining experience. In the Web 2.0 world, where immediately after dining, a netizen gets to his laptop and posts a review about that restaurant, restaurateurs have to be more than careful with every aspect.

Searches are getting simpler for diners & foodies as they can find out what others are saying about a restaurant before they choose to eat there. With the web full of restaurant recommendations and reviews based on the diner’s experience – hunting for local restaurant reviews has surely become the first step while choosing a restaurant.

Moreover user-generated content is more of a continuous process. A diner reads reviews and chooses a restaurant. And whatever the diner experiences in the restaurant’s food, service and ambience is back on the net as yet another review. The restaurant search engines encourage users to write their own review, rate restaurants and submit updated information about local restaurants. In this way, local restaurant patrons help to keep the information current and can post their opinions about their dining experiences.

Restaurant search engines like BooRah have an algorithm that captures this wisdom of crowds to bring it back to the users. The vertical search engine are more of ultimate personalized review guides featuring detailed restaurants ratings, menus, photographs, discount restaurant gift certificates and coupons, keyword searches and other relevant restaurant information (like online restaurant reservations) compiled from hundreds of sources on the Internet. Users can find professional and user reviews available from other Web sites. The search features allow users to search by name, cuisine or location. They also provide addresses, hours, driving directions, maps, etc. for all local restaurants.

So it’s not just food, but the overall experience.

New York Restaurant List for Chinese Food

Checkout the best restaurants in New York for Chinese. Search for more in http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/cu/2126/NY/New-York/9/Chinese.html

Klong Restaurant

Located in 7 Saint Marks Pl, this restaurant serves both Chinese and Thai. Food can be ordered online from Klong. Check out for restaurant reviews on food, service and ambience http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/NY/new-york/klong-restaurant/848027F73A.html

Congee Village Inc

Located in 100 Allen St, Congee offers both Chinese and Dim Sum

Chen's Gourmet

Located in 1097 2nd Ave, serves Chinese food and has excellent restaurant rating for service http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/NY/new-york/chens-gourmet/25DFA789BB.html

Jing Fong Restaurant

Situated in 18 Elizabeth St, Jing Fong is highly rated for its ambiance. http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/NY/new-york/jing-fong-restaurant/CBC07804E1.html

Chinese Mirch

Situated in 120 Lexington Ave, Chinese Mirch offers online restaurant reservations as well as one can order food online. http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/NY/new-york/chinese-mirch/F4771FF344.html

Web Search for Good Restaurants

Delicious food served gorgeously is so inviting, and a whiff of the aroma wafting is so enticing. Savoring great food is what you expect to get with every visit to the restaurant, but how to find good restaurants. Searching the web in a generic search engine like Google, doesn’t always deliver the perfect restaurant recommendation.

Thanks to Natural Language Processing technology and its use in building vertical search engines; in this context, a restaurant search engine called BooRah is simplifying searches. BooRah is a restaurant guide designed to analyze user-generated content and compile specific scores for food, service and ambience from user sentiments from across the web – blogs, review sites, social networks, wikis.

So far the search engines have been powered by a keyword based technology, which has been making searches hectic with vast amounts of data mixed with a lot of irrelevant search results. But, the use of natural language interface can make search engines more precise in retrieving information.

A restaurants directory is a great place to search restaurants that suit your social occasion. User-generated restaurant recommendations are automatically summarized from a collection of online reviews from bloggers, professional critics and consumers; and this allows consumers to search restaurants based on their personal preferences.
Happy Chowing!!!

Do We Need Niche Yelps?

Whatzit that Yelp does? Finds, reviews and talks about what's so great and not so great in our world. Yelp believes it is the ultimate city guide that taps into the community's voice and reveals honest and current insights on local businesses and services on everything. Yelpers are passionate and opinionated influencers who share their experiences with local businesses and services.

User-generated content has gained much popularity in the Web 2.0 world. We’ve begun to trust our friends and peers in finding restaurants, consumer electronics, shopping malls, dentists, or anything at all. People share their real experiences in reviews, blogs. Word-of –mouth marketing has been blended with recommendations and reviews from professionals and users in the review sites to give browsers all the information they need in one go.

Real reviews by real people is fostering a vibrant community of locals who willingly guide other users like them in making their choosing/buying decisions. This is of great help to visitors from other places and travelers. It makes even an unfamiliar place, seem familiar.

But Yelp is just one of the review sites. So that would mean, if you don’t find a listing in Yelp, you got to check other sources. Now, how about a site that has it all and especially just in each particular niche. There’s one for restaurants– BooRah. BooRah’s a vertical search engine that gathers restaurant information for all the major metros in the United States. Boorah database has info that includes 1,000,000 Restaurant Reviews, 225,000 Restaurants, 45,000 Restaurant Menus, 30,000 Restaurant Pictures, 6,000 Discount coupons for various restaurants, 4,000 Restaurants with Online Reservation capability and more.

The system in the restaurant guide uses patent-pending Natural Language Processing technology to generate quantitative scores for domain specific attributes from plain English text, automatic summaries from most relevant user sentiments and enables a highly customizable search based on personal preferences. It automatically summarizes a collection of online reviews from bloggers, professional critics and consumers, and allows consumers to search based on their personal preferences. By capturing the community vibe and social essence of existing online groups, and comparing the results to an individual's search criteria, BooRah delivers unsurpassed relevance with the broadest community reach.

Yelp not just caters to web browsers, but also the Mobile users with advanced applications like Yelp Mobile to find things on-the-go. Yelp’s mobile search service piles up nearly 150 reviews on the users mobile browser. On the other hand, BooRah sends reviews in an easy to read cell phone text message format after doing all the word crunching. Because user reviews are one the best ways to judge a restaurant, as “wisdom of crowd” matters and technology makes you get these reviews on-the-go.

Where to Dine for Mother’s Day?

Mother’s Day is an occasion to show your mother or the mother of your children, how special they are. Flowers and gifts add brownie points to make her day. To make your mom or wife really special, give them a day off the kitchen. Most people take their mother out to a restaurant on Mother’s Day, than any other day of the year. An occasion like this calls for a special restaurant as well as a special menu.

Find restaurants for the special occasion and make sure you reserve a table or two well in advance; most restaurants have an online reservation facility. Since it’s all planned for the leading ladies of your life, choose a restaurant with a cuisine of their choice. If it’s Mexican that your mom loves, search for the best Mexican restaurant recommendations.

Also have a special gift for mom, which you can present to her in the restaurant (extra surprise). It’ll be great if you can select a restaurant that plays live music. Call the restaurant or inquire online about the restaurant menu, reservations, or anything special that you might need. Do check restaurant reviews and ratings on food, service and ambiance, so you know exactly what the restaurant experience will be like. When it’s a special occasion, you need make sure that the food and place is just right.

Carry more than enough cash or card, so you don’t have to make anyone else pay. After a beautiful and memorable evening, it would be embarrassing to realize that your wallet’s at home. Make sure you have all that you need before you set out for dinner.

Show your mom how much you love her. She really deserves a great dinner on the Mothers Day. Please her with a fine dining experience with great food in a family style restaurant. Make it a memorable experience by adding in a lot of family laughter and chatter. Give your mom a royal treatment. Last but not the least, do take pictures of this occasion to add to the family album.