Find Your New Favorite Restaurant With Taste Savant
By Anthony Todd in Food on Jun 11, 2013 4:20PM
Despite the recent decline in the number of critics and food media outlets, the amount of food-related information out there can seem overwhelming to a normal, non-obsessed geek. Enter Taste Savant, a new website to help you navigate Chicago's dining scene.
Taste Savant combines all the information from all of Chicago's critics and experts (including Chicagoist) into one place, alongside reviews from users and your friends, if you link the site with your Facebook account. It allows you to make reservations at a curated selection of restaurants. You can even order takeout!
"Rather than having eight browser windows constantly open, you can do it all here," explains founder Sonia Kapadia. "We've found that users will research restaurants through lots of different sources and constantly be comparing information. We've put all of these different pieces of information in one place to create a one stop shop."
Unlike some systems that attempt to create a single aggregate score (and thereby fall prey to all the problems that plague sites like Yelp) Taste Savant gives you three different numbers for every restaurant: a critic score, a user score and a score from your friends. "Sometimes critics hate a restaurant and users love it and vice versa, the critics love it and users say it's over priced," Kapadia told us. "Most of the time, the users are agreeing with what the critics are saying." Just in case, you can see all the data for yourself. "It's kind of like Rotten Tomatoes, where you can see what the users think and what the critics think."
If you log into the site with Facebook, you can see all the restaurants that your friends are rating. Have a friend you really trust to recommend restaurants? Now it'll be hooked in with your reservation system. Taste Savant has partnered with both OpenTable and Seamless so that you can make dining reservations and order food for delivery, all the while taking advantage of all of this information.
Taste Savant launched today with a limited set of about 400 restaurants. They don't intend to be comprehensive, as they want to curate only the best available spots. However, if your favorite isn't on the list, just let them know.