Menu sites are a real convenience. My adopted hometown of Carlsbad, CA is well served by Menushark.com, a local site that PDFs dozens of menus, categorized by food type, as well as listing info and user ratings (although most of these seem to have been sent in by owners and their friends).
It’s a long way from custom menu development; a premium feature from Microsoft Sidewalk and CitySearch back-in-the-day. But it does the trick. It’s not shoddy, like Yellow Pages ads that are Xeroxed and posted in an Internet Yellow Pages.
But in the current edition of Business Week, I learned that one menu company, My Menu Pages, has gone a step further. It outsources menus to programmers in India, so that specific menu items are searchable, and can be found by neighborhood. You can find “Paid Thai” in Chelsea. Or “Linguine in Clam Sauce” in Brooklyn Heights.
In addition to New York, the company provides menu search for neighborhoods in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago. According to the Website, the 34 employee company gets 600,000 unique viewers, and is capable of adding 2,000 menus per month. Add-on products include a monthly newsletter featuring new menus, and a personalized folder to store favorite menus.
As the article notes, there is actually quite a science to breaking down a menu for local search, which My Menu Pages does by names and prices of appetizers, entrees and drinks. Restaurants themselves are categorized by cuisine type, price level and neighborhood. There is also a lot of grunt work involved. Restaurant menus are too varied for character recognition software to correctly translate all of the words into text, and image scans aren’t searchable.
Currently, very little advertising is evident on the site. But if My Menu Pages can make the economics work, it seems like it would be a welcome complement to local entertainment sites, and of course, reservation sites such as Open Table.