Yelp has many flaws. The company has long been dogged by accusations of extortion, its more rabid users can drown a businesses with negative reviews and hate speech when they disagree with someone’s politics, and roughly one in five reviews are fake. But the most annoying element of Yelping may be the school of less-than-helpful criticism that boils down to “I loved everything about this place, but we couldn’t find parking. One star.”
Sometimes, one hungers for a little more professional discernment, and a little less “needless to say, I won’t be coming back.” Something with the credibility and track record of, say, Eater.
But Eater famously doesn’t have an app—or, rather, the app that launched in 2015 disappeared somewhere along the way—and the mobile versions of its family of sites aren’t the user-friendliest. Scrolling through the latest iteration of the “Essential 38” feature might not help users book a table if they can’t cross-check the details against Eater’s own coverage. If someone’s visiting an unfamiliar city and they want pointers on a good meal, they might be even more at sea.
That’s why Ryan Matzner of the New York-based digital agency Fueled tasked his team with building their own version of an Eater app, from scratch, without approaching any of the editors in the 23 U.S. cities with an Eater site or their bosses at parent company Vox Media. Fueled staff simply constructed it between other projects, in secret, like a rogue state’s nuclear arms program—except benevolent, and full of dumplings.
“Every time I talk to someone at Eater or Vox Media, I say, ‘Your website is so hard to consume on mobile,” Matzner told The Standard. “Opening a map on your iPhone and not even having a blue dot to show your location is so frustrating.”
So his team scraped the site’s data and built their own, sharing it among an ever-growing group of friends who demanded access. Matzner’s praise for Eater’s journalistic content is as genuine as his scorn for its database—but in the end, it all came down to usability.
“I had this realization, when you’re out and about and going to the theater in Midtown, you don’t care if restaurants are on the Best Sushi list or the Best Italian list,” he said of eating in Manhattan. “You just want to see the options. That was a revolutionary insight.”
Fueled’s app uses four filters to evaluate Eater’s coverage, selecting for places that have gotten a mention in the last 30 days, 90 days, one year and five years.
Calling it a “game-changing implementation of the content they already have,” Matzner is aware that this is precisely the kind of gift that might rankle its intended beneficiary. Still, he’s ready to donate to Vox what he estimates as $500,000 and $1 million worth of work over almost 2,000 person-hours, no strings attached, just because he’s an obsessed foodie.
“I’m willing to give this entire thing away. It’s our gift to them and the foodie community,” he said. “The number of incredible experiences I’ve had because of Eater, I almost owe it to them!”
The Standard took the app for a road rest and found that, by and large, it does what it says. Built atop Apple Maps, there are hundreds of dots across the region, each with a paragraph-long blurb and links to Eater’s coverage and to the bar or restaurant itself. Navigation is clean, and the descriptions are current.
Take Bodega SF, Nobu Palo Alto alum Matt Ho’s revived Vietnamese spot on Mason Street near Union Square. The app name-checks popular dishes like shaking beef and a whole branzino while also mentioning Felix, the quasi-speakeasy downstairs. It’s pithy, up-to-date and useful.
Still, renegade Eater isn’t comprehensive, because Eater SF isn’t comprehensive. The whole Bay Area is represented, but even as food journalism has broadened far beyond its white tablecloth, Continental-cuisine bias of decades past, the entries are overwhelmingly clustered in San Francisco’s northern and eastern halves.
Even in food-obsessed neighborhoods, there are gaps. There’s no entry for Danny Bowien’s once-high-flying hipster temple Mission Chinese Food, as Eater SF hasn’t written about it in the last five years. There is, however, an entry for Commonwealth right next door.
That could lead to some consternation, as Jason Fox’s celebrated tasting menu earned his restaurant a Michelin star, but Commonwealth’s decadelong run ended in August 2019. Prubechu, the well-regarded Chamorro restaurant that’s occupied that space ever since, is searchable, though.
There are other little quirks, too. Golden Gate Park’s Hellman Hollow and Lands End—the rocky promontory near the former Cliff House—get treated like businesses, as they earned a mention in a Best Picnic Spots listicle. Woe be to the weary tourist who isn’t reading carefully and assumes a sandwich kiosk awaits them there. But by and large, this is a very useful app.
The Standard has reached out to Eater for comment. Whether Vox Media’s powers-that-be will approve of this unorthodox labor of love is unknown, as it’s only been unveiled to the general public today. If the execs give the green light, the world will know sooner or later. If they don’t, Matzner expects a cease-and-desist.
“I just hope I don’t go to jail,” he said.
Fair enough—and much better than wading through “I’d give this place zero stars if I could” ever again.