When I lived in New York City I absolutely loved discovering new places to eat. I would feverishly search sites like NY Mag and Time Out NY for the hippest, buzz-worthy restaurants. But it took time, patience and A LOT of cross-referencing to sift through reviews, comments and opinions. It would have been nice to go to one site that did all the work for me, was simple to navigate and featured trusted reviews of only the best restaurants. Oh, the hours of my life I would have saved and the more restaurants I could have enjoyed…
Luckily for current New York foodies, there’s Taste Savant, the curated food discovery site that hopes to take the frustration out of finding food. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry to know more deets.
Silencing all the Yelps
Just like a crowded, boisterous eatery, the restaurant review space is pretty noisy.
After moving back to New York from a five-year stint in Boston and London, Sonia Kapadia was a bit rusty in the NY restaurant scene. She emailed her friends to see where the best restaurants were and started her cross-referencing, time-consuming, restaurant-discovering journey that only led to frustration and confusion, and ultimately the entrepreneurial kicking-off thought:” There’s got to be an easier way”.
Sick of the thousands and thousands of reviews on Yelp, which aim to have “everything for everyone”, Sonia started Taste Savant to create just the opposite—a site that pulled reviews from all the best sources (NY Times, NY Mag, Micheline Guide) and created a resource for discovering only the best restaurants in New York City.
Taste Savant and the Discerning Diner
The site is focused on a core audience: the discerning, savvy diner—though not to be mistaken for only targeting a highbrow crowd. Sonia wants the site to benefit someone who maybe knows a bit more about food, who cares about where they eat and who doesn’t want to be disappointed.
She even further specifies the Taste Savant user as “the person that is frustrated with Yelp.”
Curation is the key to competition
There is certainly a huge restaurant review market that exists, but Sonia says it’s the curation of the site that gives it the edible edge.
By curating reviews from food industry experts (bloggers, chefs, influencers) as well as comments about food from your Facebook and Twitter friends and NOT featuring every restaurant in a city, Taste Savant manages to create a site to discover “only the best.”
Palate-pleasing partners
Single Platform, OpenTable and Seamless, have all partnered with Taste Savant so users can check out menus, make reservations and even order take-away all directly from the site. It’s truly a restaurant-discovering one-stop shop.
So far, the site only features NY restaurants, but will soon be popping up (hopefully) in a major city near you.
Saving me time and frustration by curating all the best reviews and resources in one place when I want to discover new restaurants? Yeah, that sounds delicious. Next time I’m in New York, Taste Savant is definitely on the menu.
