Five Ways For Diners To Find Your Restaurant On iPhone

The iPhone is truly something special. On the iPhone, could predict which of their friends would get married next or find the best restaurants in town.

I don’t know about friends getting married, but the second application is no doubt very interesting to a restaurant owner. Here’s five ways people are getting information about restaurants on iPhone.

1.    Yelp
I remember writing about Yelp in one of my previous posts. Anyway, Yelp allows customers to write and submit reviews about your place directly from their iPhones. Sometimes the reviews are good, but most of the time are amateur at most.

Thanks to Yelp, potential diners are now getting a taste of your menu even before they walk in the front entrance.

2.    OpenTable
OpenTable is an online reservation service for restaurants. If you’ve been in the foodservice business for some years now, you’ve probably heard about it one time or another. Diners could now use their iPhones to find your restaurant using OpenTable and even make a reservation. Brilliant.

3.    VegOut
Eating out has always been a problem for vegetarians. But not anymore. VegOut is an iPhone application that searches for vegetarian and vegan restaurants only. Put yourself in the good graces of this application if you run a vegetarian restaurant.

4.    LocalEats
The difference between LocalEats and other iPhone applications is that LocalEats only shows the 100 best restaurants within the 50 largest cities in the US. So getting your restaurant picked by one of their editors is definitely a cause for celebration.

5.    UrbanSpoon
UrbanSpoon tries to be unique by supporting a slot machine interface that selects restaurants based on three factors – food type, price, and neighborhood.

Leaving your business to chance is something no restaurant owner wants to happen. But that’s just the way it goes. The one thing you can do, however, is to make sure your restaurant is included in UrbanSpoon’s list of places.

It’s amazing how a single application could either attract or push away potential customers with the press of a button. As a restaurant owner, you need to learn to roll with the punches, and hope that Yelp doesn’t say anything about your restaurant that isn’t true.

Got any more iPhone applications in mind? Share them by leaving a comment below.