Dish.fm, the recently relaunched restaurant recommendation app which focuses on the best menu items, as opposed to overall venue reviews, is today rolling out an update which expands the service into more of a dish search engine than local utility. The company had previously allowed you to see the best dishes nearby and compare dishes inside a restaurant, but now the app also helps you find the best dish (e.g., steak, tiramisu, pizza, etc.) anywhere – whether that’s 10 minutes away, in your city, or even elsewhere in the world.
When the startup had originally launched, it had gone the “Foodspotting” route, which had it relying on crowdsourced photos and reviews. Following the app’s overhaul, which debuted this past December, the new focus has been on building on top of established content from sources like Yelp, Foursquare and Instagram. In order to determine the best dishes around, Dish.fm analyzes public reviews and tips found across the web, extracts those, and counts each positive review as a “like” within its application.
With today’s update, that functionality has been expanded, now allowing users to search for favorite foods, drinks or desserts anywhere they want, using a slider at the bottom of the app’s homescreen which can be set to anything from 0.1 miles to 15 miles to search closer to home. Or, if you’re planning a trip, for instance, a new search interface lets you search for both dishes or restaurants by name in another city, and display these on map or within Dish.fm’s now cleaner, visual interface featuring photos of the items in question.
The app has also added key details like the restaurant’s hours, directions and phone number, and has updated user profiles to rank dishes by the date reviewed, so it can serve as a diary of your favorite meals.
When Dish.fm relaunched in December, it supported just two cities ( New York and San Francisco) with a total of 3 million reviews analyzed. In March, the company added 13 more cities, and today it has 865 cities on board, with over 8 million reviews analyzed, as well as 8 million plus photos. Over a million of the app’s dishes have votes – meaning users have said the item is “awesome” or “awful.”
In tests, resetting the city to somewhere else in the world outside of your own, was still a little buggy – a couple of times after making the switch and tapping the results, the app would still show my last searches on the screen. But an additional attempt would correct the problem, so it seems like there might be a couple of bugs left to squash. (Your mileage, as they say, may vary.)
The updated version of Dish.fm, available for iPhone and iPad, is available now here on the Apple App Store.