Intertube-savvy metropolitan diners now have yet another way to make sure their every culinary craving is sated: the new website FoodieBytes, now beta testing, lets users search restaurant menus based on the food they desire. For instance, typing in “pesto” and “whole wheat pasta” yields over a hundred New York eateries. You can narrow your search by neighborhood and, once you find a restaurant that seems appealing, peruse the entire menu, get the hours, address and price info, and find directions through a Google Maps interface.
You can also search for restaurants by name and add your own rating if you’ve been there or if you own it and just want to shill. (The restaurant’s Citysearch rating also pops up for a second opinion.) The website still has some kinks to work out; our search for “absinthe” in Astoria yielded Death & Co. in the East Village and dozens of results for L’Absinthe on the Upper East Side. Still, if we had not searched for “chocolate malted milkshake” we might not have known that Stanton Social serves it as a “shot”. Bro, we are so getting chocolate malted Jäger car bombs tonight.
Of course, the oh-so-mature bloggers at Eater SF immediately searched for restaurants serving “human” and “crap”, which – no surprise here – turned up results in San Francisco. Oh, California. Discerning cannibals and coprophagists in New York won’t find any local restaurants to satisfy their cravings through FoodieBytes, but Roebling Tea Room does serve a tea “scented with rose penis”. Ha. Okay, so we’re as puerile as San Francisco.
