Burned out on the predictable recommendations from Yelp, Foursquare, Recco, and other socially driven dining apps? Ness Dining Guide (free) makes a solid go at recommending eateries it thinks you'll like based on your prior experiences, as well as data from a number of social networks. It culls information from not just your friends and preferences, but several social networks more generally, looking for chatter on Twitter, Facebook Places check-ins, reviews on Citysearch, and more to determine when a restaurant or bar is happening.
Design and Interface
Ness has good looks on its side, with a very pretty interface full of gorgeous backdrop photos of brightly colored sushi rolls, mile-high pies, darling espresso cup sets, and more. On most screens, these photos fill the screen with buttons and text entry fields layered on top with semi-transparent windows to keep all that delicious food in sight.
The opening screen uses the background images to show different types of restaurants that it can recommend, such as Asian, Middle Eastern, bakery, and brewery. Six options appear on screen, with more available as you swipe right-to-left. A search box sits in the center if you choose to type instead.
Searching with typed text can be simple or complex. You might enter a type of cuisine, signature food served (like pizza, burgers, ice cream), or name of a restaurant. Or you can add more filters, such as distance from your current location and price range. One great set of filters is called "hide," which lets you suppress restaurants that are "closed now," "rated" if don't want to go to a place you've been (and therefore rated on Ness) before, and "big chains" to make sure Micky Dee's doesn't crop up in the results.
Functionality and Recommendations
Ness prompts you to rate at least a few businesses before you really dive into the app so that it can better guess what you'll like. In fact, it shows you right on screen how many more four-and five-star ratings it wants you to give before it's fairly certain it can do a good job. To give it some basis, I searched for restaurants in the neighborhoods where I've lived and worked, as well as places I tend to eat out most.
As I'm in New York City, the selection of restaurants can be daunting, even after you drill down to a specific neighborhood. In looking, for example, in my old stomping ground of Astoria, I recognized a lot of delis and take-out restaurants in Ness, but didn't see my favorite pizzeria, a new ramen shop that's more than decent, or a specialty grilled cheese and beer restaurant that has gotten a lot of well deserved buzz in the two-and-a-half years since it opened. I noticed the same pattern of well-known (and well-respected) restaurants not showing up in other neighborhoods, like midtown east and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, too.
It's also difficult to go back or undo an action if you make an error. For example, when you rate restaurants from a list, giving it anywhere from one to five stars, it then disappears from the list instantly. A few times, my clumsy fingers hit the wrong number of stars, and I cursed when I realized I couldn't easily change it. (You can go through a preferences section to make changes to existing reviews, but that involves finding it from the main navigation bar, opening the correct area, and swiping through what could be a very long list of rated restaurants.)
Considering I didn't find some of my favorite restaurants auto-populating Ness' lists by area, I was pleasantly surprised when it came time to get some recommendations. Ness guessed my taste in coffee shops fairly accurately, suggesting I'd more than "like" a few coffee houses that I regularly visit.
Ness actually generates a percent score for how much it thinks you'll enjoy a restaurant. A lot of my scores keep hitting the 62 to 71 percent range (which amounts to "like but not love"), and I have yet to see Ness confidently declare that I'll love a place. But on the whole, the recommendations fit my tastes.
Socially Enhanced
Ness hooks into a lot of other social networks. You can connect with Foursquare and Facebook accounts to see what's going on among your friends' dining activities, but the app pulls in other valuable crowd-sourced information, too.
For example, you can look up the "popularity" of, say, a doughnut shop ("#1 in Greenpoint!"), which considers the number of people talking about it on Facebook and Twitter, as well as check-ins to the business via Foursquare and Facebook Places, and reviews on Citysearch. The variety of information going into the popularity rankings seems to do the results some good. When you only consider one selected social network for popularity, you can get some pretty predictable results. Ness' analyze a very good range of people, tastes, and opinions.
My favorite section of the app is for photos, which come from Instagram rather than a food-specific social network. Instagram photos, super-saturated or washed out as they may be, tend to look better than photos on Yelp, Facebook, or Foursquare. The photos show a lot of lovely food and some random faces that sometimes give you an even better sense of an undiscovered diner and its clientele.
Dine With Ness
Food-focused people should download Ness and explore its recommendations, especially when dining out in a large city that has a plethora of neighborhoods and eating options. I like that Ness' recommendations don't rely solely on information from its users, instead raking in recommendations, photos, and mentions from a variety of sites.
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