justnoms: Making Dining Decisions Easier

Hello fellow LTHers! I’ve been an avid reader (and occasional poster) of the forums here at LTH since moving to Chicago in 2013, and want to thank all of you for helping to make my life in Chicago a delicious one. I will be graduating from Northwestern University with a Master of Science in Analytics this December, and I’ve decided to turn my two passions - food and analytics - into a dream of mine. I’ve started up my own food rating site: http://www.justnoms.com.

I know some (most?) despise Yelp! as much as I do, and luckily for us we have LTH. But most don’t. But even with LTH, I found myself having to pull up LTH and searching threads for what to order when I got to the restaurants on my list (it’s almost 300 restaurants long now!). Then, I started to take notes on what to order at restaurants, and it became a pretty tedious process. So I decided to develop my own solution: a rating system for menu items, so you know what dishes are good at the restaurant. So instead of rating the restaurant (and we all know how skewed those ratings get with people giving extreme ratings for all sorts of reasons, sometimes not even related to the food) you rate the dish(es) you ate. Sometimes a restaurant churns out a few really great dishes, and a few not-so-great dishes; now you have a chance to help others discern those.

The other aspect that I am excited about with justnoms is the ability to use analytics to provide personalized ratings and recommendations to each user. I’ll spare you the technical jargon, but justnoms will be able to provide personalized recommendations on dishes/places just like Netflix recommends movies. And justnoms will also be able to provide each user with personalized ratings, so that the rating that he/she sees is much more aligned with his/her tastes (by accounting for biases - again I won’t get technical here, but if you see 4 stars, you can trust it). Lastly, since we are in Alpha testing (we’re launching in Chicago and SF with a limited number of restaurants initially), it will take some time to get the necessary data to provide the personalized ratings and recommendations, but the more you rate the sooner it will happen!

And for each of the first 3 months, we are giving away a $25 gift certificate to one of the restaurants to one of our registered users (the more you rate, the better your chances)! So help me (and everyone else who is looking for good food) out and sign up at http://www.justnoms.com today and start rating!

Thanks!
Dave

If any fellow LTHers are restaurant owners and you want your restaurant added to our db when we add another batch of restaurants, let me know, and I'll be happy to put it at the top of the list. Also, if there is a personal fave that you would like to see added, let me know as well. I would love to help the collective food knowledge of LTH get out to some of the general public.