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Time Out

This new site makes finding a great NYC restaurant way less annoying

If you've ever fallen down a 20-tab rabbit hole trying to pick a decent dinner spot in the city only to wind up at a place with $28 truffle fries and the ambiance of a dentist's office, there's a new tool in town that might save your sanity (and your date night). Meet a just-launched site that pulls together the internet's food chatter—Reddit threads, Instagram tags and (soon) editorial articles—and compiles it into clean, searchable profiles for more than 2,700 New York restaurants. Instead of toggling between Yelp, Google, Reddit and the like, you can now browse everything in one place, complete with highlight dishes, sentiment summaries, and a whole mess of handy tags like ' date-night,' ' Chinese ' or 'cash-only.' The site is the brainchild of Steven (who prefers not to use his last name for anonymity reasons), a 29-year-old software engineer and lifelong Morningside Heights local. His inspiration? A Restaurant Week disaster six years ago, when he sent a friend to a Yelp-praised restaurant that turned out to be such a dud it torpedoed the poor guy's date. 'That moment stuck with me,' Steven told Time Out. 'I realized that finding a truly great restaurant in NYC requires more than relying on a single source.' So he built Starved as a side project, working nights and weekends from April to July. The result is something between a crowd-sourced food archive and a digital cheat sheet; it's more curator than critic. The site doesn't generate its own reviews; instead, it surfaces the voices of others: top Reddit comments, standout Instagram posts and soon, mentions in editorial outlets like the Infatuation, T he New York Times and yours truly, Time Out. There are already more than 36,000 references in the system, including real-time picks like the most upvoted Restaurant Week restaurants. You can browse by neighborhood, cuisine, vibe or even dishes (yes, there's a 'cacio e pepe' tag). While Steven has no plans to monetize the site ('just trying to recoup server costs'), he's hopeful it'll make New Yorkers' most stressful daily decision a little easier. 'I believe choosing the right restaurant in NYC still requires personal judgment,' he says. 'I hope to help make the decision-making process easier.'