New Restaurants, Old Favorites

By Laura Oppenheimer in Food on Dec 17, 2007 6:20PM

Chicagoist has been known to wax philosophic when it comes to websites that make dining out and ordering in easier. We've written about two of our favorites, MenuPages and GrubHub, here and here, respectively. There's a new kid in town, and her name is FoodieBytes. We can already feel MenuPages and GrubHub shaking in their internet boots.

The premise of FoodieBytes is pretty simple; put an ingredient or dish in which you are interested into its search, and the site will let you know everywhere in the city that serves up what you are looking for. Our friends in New York tried it out and found it useful, though still with a few kinks. We decided to test it out for ourselves, and either the site is out of date already (seems unlikely) or there are still some Chicago restaurants playing fast and loose with the law. A search for "foie gras" turned up 39 restaurants that offer up the illegal goose liver. We decided to compare FoodieBytes with MenuPages (which has a similar search function) to see who found us more ways to indulge our foie gras longings. Unfortunately, MenuPages only lets you search by neighborhood, so our tally might be off, but by our count, it only found 12 restaurants offering foie. FoodieBytes 1, MenuPages 0.

But neither of these have the one feature we love more than any other; GrubHub's delivery function. In our ideal world, all three of these sites would be combined into one ultimate menu-providing, food-searching, delivery-oriented, reservation-making website. We can dream, right?