Michelin Guide star per wikipedia:

“The guide awards one to three stars to a small number of restaurants of outstanding quality. One star indicates a “very good cuisine in its category”, a two-star ranking represents “excellent cuisine, worth a detour,” and three stars are awarded to restaurants offering “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey”.
A three-star Michelin ranking is rare. As of late 2009, there were 26 three-star restaurants in France, and only 81 in the world.”

If you watch many of the International cooking and restaurant shows, you will hear the likes of Gordon Ramsay keep talking up that a chef or restaurant is good enough for a Michelin Star. What does a star on a restaurant mean to you? You can grab a ‘guide’ and find those restaurants that a food specialist said you will like.

Enter, Foodspotting. A Web site, iPhone app and Andriod app that allows people to say what they like, at a individual dish level. There are no negative reviews, nor restaurant level reviews. The app allows the user to snap a photo, share what they liked about it and give dishes they ‘really’ liked a Blue Ribbon.

What this means to you and me is that we can search for a food type in an area and find only the dishes that are rated as worth your time to try. There is no fine print to read through to find out the reviewer didn’t actually like a dish. If your interested in Pizza, you don’t have to go to an high rated Italian Restaurant that is only good at spaghetti.

Along with the good does come some issues with Foodspotting. When the iPhone app first came out, it took way too long to enter a great food find you wanted to share. The new version of the app (released March 14th) has made the process much easier.

Generally when I hear someone mention Foodspotting in person or in an article, no one can avoid bringing up Foursquare. There is talk of employees shared across the systems, or developers working on one project moving to another. It doesn’t matter what is actually happening, the folks at Foodspotting really need to get on top of this since it only confuses people. Users of Foursquare ‘check in’ at a location that tells me nothing about how the food was. Foursquare s all about how many times a person visits a location.

While the iPhone Foodspotting app isn’t perfect, it does give you info on ‘what to eat’ very quickly. The automatic ‘near me’ hasn’t worked well for me, North Kentucky is a bit of a drive for me from North Texas. Getting around that is simple enough by dropping a GPS pin then looking for the food type I’m looking for around that area.

Like any service where your given a chance to tell other people your opinion, the Foodspotting service is only successful if people actually post what they like. Download the free app to use the free service and take a picture of your next ‘great’ meal so when I’m in your area I know where to go. Thanks!