Picking a restaurant sucks. It sucks so much that even after the success of Yelp, there are still dozens of apps trying to make it better:

Urban Spoon
Foodspotting
Forkly
Ness

Just to name a few..

All of these fail to solve the largets remaining problem: What do I eat once I get there?

 Menu’s are big, they have dishes you or the people at your table have never tried before. The waiter tells you everything is good when you desperately ask them for guidance.  So you end up sticking the the usual.

Eventually you get to the point where you are making decisions on where to eat based on “the usual,” thus exacerbating the whole where to eat problem.

Like trying to find a good song by looking at album reviews, picking a place to eat is as much about individual dishes as it is about the quality of the restaurant as a whole.

Yelp doesn’t help. Luckily there are two apps trying to solve the problem.

Nosh and Tasted Menu.

As painful as the problem is, they both have a content problem to solve (how do you get all the reviews?).  Of the two apps, Tasted Menu is opting to build critical mass before moving to new cities, as well as leveraging the network voodoo of SXSW.

Yelp needs to take these apps seriously and start competing or acquiring.  For the sake or diners everywhere.