Chicago Menu Pages
By Rachelle Bowden in Food on Feb 12, 2006 1:03PM
Chicagoist is in love with the site Menu Pages so when the site's creator emailled us last week to tell us there's a Chicago version available now, our heads exploded just a little bit. At its most basic, Menu Pages is a site where you can go to see restaurant menus. Enter a restaurant into the search box, press the button and badda-boom, there's the restaurant's menu.
This site makes all those menus you have in your top kitchen drawer obsolete. Need delivery? Click on "Restaurants with Delivery," choose your neighborhood, and click on one of the restaurants in your neighborhood who delivers to view the menu and call them up.
IMing with your friends, getting ready to leave work, and trying to decide where to have dinner? It's simple to choose a neighborhood or a cuisine you're in the mood for and then check out the menus to decide exactly where to go. Also, and this is very important. Sometimes menus on a restaurant's official site don't have prices, but all of the menus on Menu Pages have prices so you know what you're getting into before you get there.
Had something delicious at 2am last night but you were too drunk to remember what it was? Click on "Open 24 Hours" and choose the restaurant. Ohhhh. It must have been the chorizo in that burrito that made it so good.
Besides searching and browsing by neighborhood, cuisine or map area, there are some other cool features on Menu Pages - You can search for restaurants that serve a particular food. In the mood for tiramisu? Or beef wellington? Search for restaurants that have those dishes on their menu. The site is also customizable. Sign up for a free account and you'll not only be able to save your favorite menus, but you'll get a monthly newsletter. Since the Chicago version of the site is new, there aren't many reviews on restaurants in the database yet, but we're sure there will be soon.
Finally, you know sometimes when you're looking for a restaurant's official site and it just isn't coming up in Google? It's so frustrating. Well, Menu Pages includes links to the restaurant's official site, unlike some other sites with restaurant listings (ahem, Metromix!).
The Menu Pages database is still growing, but if you happen to find restaurants they don’t have, just let them know and they’ll be sure to add it.