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Alternatives

Products that do what Instant Search in NYC Restaurant Menus does

A few years ago I wrote a crawler to fetch all NYC menus. I wanted to prove that many specific dishes can't be found in NYC restaurants. After more than two years that I had forgotten about the project I decided to clean it up, deal with the css, and put it online. The number of interesting dishes that can be found is actually quite surprising. The backend is written using nodejs without any framework (no db, just a bunch of in memory DS) and vanilla js/html/css for the frontend.

  1. 1

    A crowdsourced map for restaurant menus

    2019

  2. 2IA

    I found the official website https://www.nyctourism.com/restaurant-week slow and tedious to navigate, so I hacked together a fast, filterable map to showcase the participating NYC restaurants during Restaurant Week. It's in pure HTML, CSS, and JS, and it uses Leaflet for mapping and a utility JS file for the searchable multi-select input. If you're interested, check out the unminified source code by right-clicking and selecting "view source". The full source is available here: https://github.com/Blue9/restaurant-week.

    2023 · nyc.jimoapp.com

  3. 3

    Order like a local!

    2025

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    A search engine for popular restaurant menus

    2017

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    Twomato76

    Best place to find restaurants, menus, deals and coupons.

    2020

  6. 6
    Yumbox127

    Track and filter your favorite restaurants

    2025

  7. 7
    Hangry164

    Let the app pick a random place where your can eat! 🍔

    2016

  8. 8

    Your daily recommendation is a tap away

    2024

  9. 9OF

    Today we've launched happytables ( http://www.happytables.com ), a squarespace / wordpress.com for restaurants. I had posted on HN before about a previous iteration we performed ( http://bit.ly/sn0FWc ), and am really satisfied how far we've gotten with it all. The entire solution is built on top of WordPress, it's allowed us to quickly prototype and build various components. It'll be interesting to see if other solutions pop-up for unrelated niche markets using WordPress too (i.e. real estate, sports clubs, etc.). Would love to hear your feedback on our concept and would gladly answer any…

    2012

  10. 10CA

    This is my MVP. It's not quite really ready to unleash, but what the heck. http://cilantrosites.com SHORT PITCH: About.me for restaurants LONGER PITCH: Single-page websites for restaurants that don't suck. Instant setup. Hours, map, menu, contact/social, email list, mobile version. No Flash. No PDFs. KNOWN ISSUES: (a) can add menu items but not edit/del. (b) additional settings (mainly domain mapping) are turned off (c) if you're editing colors, make sure to scroll to the top of the page, (d) many others FEEDBACK WELCOME: I have tough skin. Also, I know much of the design is average. I have…

    2011

  11. 11

    Mapping all of the dollar slices in NYC

    2019

  12. 12

    Restaurant reviews & guides

    2019

  13. 13

    A simple food substitutes finder

    2018

  14. 14

    Share the menu with Ava and see what each dish may look like

    Jun 2026 · abitdifferently.com

  15. 15DN
  16. 16MS

    Hello HN! I've been working on http://underthesite.com for the last month and now think it is ready for some full strength HN feedback. What do you guys think? It crawls up to 10 pages of a given site while you wait, looking for community-provided CSS / XPath selectors and regular expressions. Additionally, I'd like to appeal to you to submit matchers for technologies that you care about. Technologies are easy to add, so add your favorite jQuery plugins, analytics tools, client-side node.js wrappers, what have you. I'm going to be running a large crawl in the next few days and want to make…

    2011

  17. 17CE
  18. 18IM

    Hi hn! It has always annoyed me that recipe websites are so cluttered and have so much (in my opinion) useless fluff, so I made a little website to solve that problem! One good thing about SEO for once is that Google has pretty much forced the internet to adopt JSON-LD for recipes so many recipes are directly extractable and for others I have several fall back parsers including an indieweb parser :) If you do find a website that is broken feel free to click the flag button or share it as I would love to fix any edge cases

    Apr 2026 · tangled.org

  19. 19
    iCrave4

    Search by dish, not restaurant.

    Jun 2026 · icravehq.com

  20. 20IB

    I recently built an iOS app called Settld: Group Restaurant Finder that helps friends decide where to meet by finding restaurants that are roughly equally far from everyone’s location, and displaying information about them. We’ve all been in chaotic group chats where no one can agree on where to eat — this app cuts through that by calculating a “sweet spot” for the group. For 2 people, it’s the midpoint. For 3 people, it’s the circumcenter. For 4–6 people, it uses a minimum enclosing circle approach (Welzl’s algorithm). It then shows the top 15 nearby options so there’s no more “where do we…

    2025 · settld.space

  21. 21MF

    A little background: I'd been throwing this idea around in my head for a while, and finally had some free time between two quarters of school, and decided to make the site. I spent several days over the break laying out the backend for the site, and starting coding, and then the next few weekends finishing it up (and I've been making small changes since then). Where I got the idea: I originally got the idea when trying to look up coupons for some pizza places, and having a lot of trouble finding any that worked at my store since they were all regional, or weekly codes, so I just manually…

    2012

  22. 22LF

    If you guys are interested in high-quality food products please let me know what you think of my website prototype. 1)Do you understand immediately what the site is about? 2)Is it easy enough to understand how it works? 3)If ready to roll in your neighborhood would you be interested in subscribing to a service like this? I am in the process of getting a closed-beta off the ground in Brooklyn and I am really interested in all kinds of feedback about the idea, the design, UX. Thanks. http://www.the-local-kitchen.com

    2012

  23. 23MS

    I was inspired by Feross Aboukhadijeh's instant search for YouTube, so I took the latest Etsy API and built an instant search for them. I'd love it if you'd try it out and let me know what you think. It is at http://www.glancely.com/ I really hope it doesn't need an explanation, but start typing what you're looking for. I used tags on the listings (among other things) to fuel my suggestions. Click a color to filter on those listings, click to sort on price. Click again to deselect. I've tested on the latest Firefox, Chrome and IE on Windows and Safari on an iPad. You will need JavaScript to…

    2010

  24. 24AI

    I moved to St. Louis a few years ago, and I started documenting the food I've tried, neighborhoods I've explored, and just the random stuff I've learned in a website. It has a few features: Food map[1]: a map where you can filter restaurants/cafes by type of cuisine, neighborhood, or rating, and sort by rating or alphabetical. Neighborhood map[2]: a map of all the neighborhoods and parks in the city, and some notable St. Louis county suburbs. I tried to make it interlinked and fun to explore, so you can land on the page for Sultan (restaurant) which leads you to The Grove…

    Jul 2026 · stlouing.com

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