I’ve heard like a billion people complain about this recently so here goes: When you’re starving you don’t want to read through thousands of Yelp reviews on your phone or download a random PDF from a terrible restaurant website that’s so slow-loading it’s indecipherable. You just want to know where a restaurant is, what it has to eat, and whether or not it’s open.
‘Menu and Hours’, a Kickstarter project, is an app designed just to give you just the menu, hours, contact info and location of local eateries — the antidote to unnavigable mobile restaurant sites and TMI foodie services like Urbanspoon. Brilliant, right?
“The general idea is that when you’re looking for information about restaurants on your iPhone chances are pretty good you’re looking for the menu, the restaurant’s hours and contact info. That’s it,” says creator Michelle Jones, “You don’t want PDFs, you don’t want to get an icon telling you the site is broken for you because it was built-in Flash, you don’t want to have to click-through ‘splash pages’ just to get the basic information. Even though you might not want those things, they are exactly what most restaurant websites are going to give you.”
It’s true, people really hate restaurant websites.
Jones tells me that if she raises the initial $6K in Kickstarter funding, she’s going to start the first version of the app in her hometown of Louisville (it’s pronounced real awesome in that video above), but if it takes off wants to expand it to Atlanta, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. “All of those are great food cities and I already have supporters for the project in those cities,” Jones says.
Paris and New York would be good too. Heads up!