Don't Know What To Eat? Be Chewsy!

These days, it is pretty easy to get an overall sense of which restaurants are good and which ones you should stay away from. There are apps and websites galore to help you get to a restaurant you should enjoy. But what happens when you get there and sit down? What is good? What is a flop? Why rely on the restaurant staff to tell you what is good? I mean, they get told which dishes to push anyway.

Enter Chewsy. A new app available now for the iPhone and iPod Touch, gives you instant access to what other diners think of individual dishes and drinks at any restaurant. Developed by a Seattle based group of Microsoft employees and thoroughly tested by a bunch of local iOS users, Seattle already has a ton of reviews at many of the more popular eateries.

I was lucky enough to have been invited to the closed beta, which ran for about four months in the fall, and was able to quickly realize just how useful this app could be. Not having to weed though tons of Yelp reviews where people complain about the skylight or how another customer was doing something they didn't like, just to find out that the tacos at Plum Bistro are to DIE for is a huge time saver.

You can review the things you eat to help others decide what is good. Once you do review an item, you can share it on Facebook and Twitter using the app's "Transmogrificationer."

That's described by Chewsy as this:

"The Chewsy Transmogrificationer is a top-secret supercomputer that translates your dish reviews into whimsical one-liners to share with friends. Ok, it’s not top-secret nor is it a supercomputer. It’s just a complicated word we came up with (inspired by Calvin and Hobbes) that refers to a really simple idea we had to improve auto-generated posts. We wanted to infuse the social graph with something people care about and we also wanted to add some humor in the process."

It is a really fun way to share with all of your social site contacts and maybe make them laugh at the same time. My favorite is from a recent trip to Unicorn. They have some pretty good signature drinks there, but when a friend posted "The Unicorn Jizz at Unicorn makes your mouth water and your pants wet" on Facebook, I couldn't help but crack up.

(Full disclosure time. While I am a personal friend of one of the developers, I can honestly say I would love this app regardless of who made it. They did not pay me to say any of this, but now that I think of it, perhaps I should demand they buy me dinner or something. I will at least know what to order!)

You can get Chewsy for free from the Apple Store. It will also be available for Android and Windows devices sometime this year.