Website Review: Smorgie.com Online Restaurant List

A few days ago, I was invited to do a review on Smorgie.com, a recently launched website where foodies like myself can share our favorite dining spots and look for a new restaurant to try. The latter sparked my curiosity and so I took up the offer to check it out.

What is Smorgie.com?

Smorgie.com – Make and Share lists of Yummy is an online resource site developed by the Design and Innovation group at Gannett—the parent company of USA Today. It is meant to be a social website where food lovers can come together and share their favorite restaurants and other must-visit places in their local dining scene in the form of restaurant lists created by its members.

Features of the Smorgie.com Restaurant List Website

Multiple Restaurant Lists

One of the main features I immediately discovered while trying out Smorgie.com is that it allows users to create more than one restaurant list that they can share with other fellow foodies. There is no limit to the number of lists of restaurants that you can create under your account. This allows you to streamline your restaurant list such that it can very well become the beginnings of your very own local restaurant guide.

Add to Places Icon

Another feature provided by Smorgie.com is the “Add to Places” icon. This icon shows up underneath the description of each of the restaurants and dining spots posted by other members in their own restaurant lists. By clicking on this icon, you’re able to store all the information of the restaurant in your own list so there is no need to copy and paste all the information.

Google Maps

Smorgie.com immediately embeds a Google Map onto the information page of each restaurant that you have included in your list. While the Google Map is rather small, viewers can just zoom in to see the actual site and landmarks close to the restaurant that you have recommended to help them find it when they decide to pay the restaurant a visit.

What’s Good about Smorgie.com?

Versatility

Although Smorgie.com was primarily designed to be a website where you can create, view, and share lists of restaurants and other dining spots, the way how they designed the website has the potential to be used in other ways. You can also create lists for recommended food shops and concessionaires within your local community that food lovers and businesses can check out as well.

Each restaurant you add in your list at Smorgie.com gets its own clean and well laid out page.

Clean Restaurant List

Another thing I like about Smorgie.com is the clean layout you get not only for each of your restaurant lists, but also for each of the restaurants that you include in your lists. I tried it out by adding the information on Cafe Mary Grace–one of the restaurants I wrote a review here in my blog. As you can see from the screenshot I took of the final page created by Smorgie.com, all of the important information are listed on the top part of the page, making it very easy for viewers to find and does not require any scrolling down.

Simple and Easy to Use

From registering for an account to creating your first restaurant list, Smorgie.com is very easy to use and straightforward. The icons are self-explanatory and quite easy to follow.

What’s Not-So-Good About Smorgie.com?

Like I mentioned earlier, this website is still in its experimental stage. That being said, it is not surprising to find a few bumps while trying it out.

Restaurant List Search Not Functioning

Like most websites, Smorgie.com has a search function that supposedly allows you to do a search for restaurant lists within their database based on either the name of the restaurant or a city. I said supposedly because when I tried it, it was not providing any search results. To make sure that there would be one, I browsed through the different restaurant lists already posted in the website and used some of the restaurants and cities mentioned here to do my search. With 43 pages of restaurant lists to browse, making the search function operational would be a very big help.

First Come, First Serve Basis

While the restaurants you add in your list are arranged in your “Places” page with the most recent one first, the same is not true in your restaurant list. Here, it is the other way around. The most recent one is listed on the bottom part of the list. Hence, it can be quite tedious for someone following your list to keep up with your latest restaurant find and recommendation. There is also no option provided to allow you to arrange the different restaurants in your list. The only way I found to fix this was to delete the entire list and then just add each restaurant as I would like it to show in my list. This method is fine if you only got a couple of restaurants posted. But once you got a lot, it can be a lot of work.

No Comment

Aside from checking out recommended restaurants, I’d like to also go through reviews posted by others that have tried the place to see its consistency and accuracy. Right now, the only way to do that is to visit Yelp.com, with which Smorgie.com has partnered with. It would be nice if the site would allow users to give their feedback on the restaurant recommended to find out how their experience has been.

My Verdict on Smorgie.com

Overall, I have to say that I am quite pleased with my experience trying Smorgie.com. It’s a useful resource site where I can go to check where to eat in places that I plan to visit based on the recommendations for fellow foodies. Since it is a new website, there are a few setbacks. Despite these, Smorgie.com appears to be very promising and it’s quite interesting to see how it will develop in the coming weeks and months.

Now it’s your turn! Visit Smorgie.com – Make and Share lists of Yummy today, give it a try, and let me know what you think.