Vancouver Restaurant Directories
by
Living in this regions means that you can probably walk out your door to find a place to eat dinner and have your choice of sushi, curry, pad thai, burgers or yam fries. However when you don’t have a favourite eatery or are looking for something new, where do you look? I’ve put together a small list of directories that you can sort through for ratings, locations and reviews of restaurants around the Lower Mainland.
Dine Here – This is usually the directory that comes up first whenever I do a search, often ahead of the restaurant’s own website. The reviews can be pretty blunt (like most other review sites) but in general it’s pretty useful and cover all of the region, not just Vancouver.
Urban Spoon – Harnessing the power of social media, Urban Spoon encourages bloggers to share their reviews, embed badges, rank restaurants and provides great mashup maps sorted by food type or neighbourhood. They even have an iPhone app that you can use on the go. Diner reviews are as simple as a click of the mouse. They certainly have grown leaps and bounds over the last year.
Food Vancouver – All about food in Vancouver, not just restaurant reviews. From wine to events and recipes. They also have a focus on special dietary needs, “cholesterol and heart health, diabetes, gluten free, high blood pressure, high fibre, inflammatory bowel, lactose intolerant, vegetarian, and weight loss.”
Tasting Vancouver – Nice, clean-looking site and it’s built with WordPress. They only cover Vancouver neighbourhoods so far, but this new kid on the block looks very promising – they just need your help to get more reviews on there.
10 Comments — Comments Are Closed
Or they can also scroll through my “dining out” category 🙂
Or Karen’s or Kitsilano.ca‘s hehe. I thought I would leave blogs out of the official directory list for now 😛
True, true 🙂 It’s the self-absorbedness in me 😀
Thanks for the mention Miss604!
WordPress is definitely a great platform for what I hope to be a high traffic website for food lovers of Vancouver.
Thanks again 🙂
Thanks for mentioning my site on the list.
Kevin
Hey again
Inspired by my time in Vancouver where free wi-fi reigned supreme, and returning home to New Zealand to remember we aren’t so generous, I decided to start a crusade to find free wi-fi and good coffee in the same place. So I started a (very very) small version of what’s above.
I hate to say it, I had to give Ning a go, purely because of the members authorship aspect, hint wordcamp(?). The thing with this sort of site, is that although it should look good, it of course should be functional. While my site looks good (my mum told me so), Ning is very limited in plugins etc (you’ll be pleased to hear). The sites you mention above are good, but seriously, the aesthetic aspect is a little lacking (sorry Kevin and Dave). For something that is so sensory as eating out (mmm Cactus Club Dry Ribs – hint anyone care package to New Zealand), you’d think that as well as making the sites functional, you’d be looking to entice the user into the whole mouth watering experience?
So my coffee/wi fi crusade will be switching platforms, and I’ll be looking at these guys to see what I can learn from them. Cheers for the post, very interesting.
http://longflatwhite.ning.com/
ps how, why and what became of Vineyard now Browns? Used to live on 5th just behind Vineyard and loved it.
@ Paul – Thanks for your comments, we are always looking for ways to improve the site and make it a site for every foodie in Vancouver…
New Zealand eh! What’s the restaurant scene like over there?
Don’t forget Wikitravel — http://wikitravel.org/en/Vancouver . As part of its charter to “create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable worldwide travel guide”, it has several restaurant listings for the various districts of Vancouver, not to mention the various destinations in the Lower Mainland.
Is your favourite restaurant missing? It’s a wiki — you can add it!
Wikitravel’s pages on British Columbia and Washington State are among the places I do my volunteer wiki-gardening. The Lower Mainland coverage is good, but could benefit from more contributors. See you there!
Dave,
the restaurant scene in NZ is brilliant, depending on where you live. However because it’s also such a small place filled with tourists, you can still find some of the best chefs hiding in the strangest glacier filled corners of the country.
Good timing though, we’ve just had restaurant of the year awards announced and a good friend of mine got runner up.
http://www.cuisine.co.nz/index.cfm?pageID=38599&r=7
But I’d have to say Wellington is the place to go for vibrancy.
Don’t forget though to compliment the eating is the wine, and a New Zealand Pinot Noir has just been judged the world’s best red wine!!!
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/6/story.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10530709
Hi,
You may want to take a look at http://www.nextdine.com. We have just launched it.
Tell me what you think.
See ya,
~ms