New iOS app Dish.fm does more than suggest restaurants, it tells you what to order

A new app uses online reviews and photos from Instagram to generate suggestions for individual orders at restaurants.

There are plenty of applications that can direct you to a restaurant or provide accurate reviews, but what happens when you get there and can’t decide what to order? There’s an app for that.

Dish.fm, the new iOS and Web app that just launched today, helps users decide on an individual dish. The new app currently covers restaurants in San Francisco and New York City, but more locations are coming soon. In order to brainstorm suggestions, Dish.fm analyzes tons of reviews from other services such as Yelp and Foursquare and looks at any mentions of individual dishes. The app takes both positive and negative reviews into account and also sources image from platforms like Instagram, according to The Next Web.

Users can start out by browsing restaurants by name or location. Once a place is chose, users can then peruse dishes by rank. Each dish is ranked by popularity based on the number of positive citations pulled from online reviews. These dishes are accompanied by photos, and users also have the option to add their own image if necessary. Dish.fm patrons can add their own opinion to the mix by rating each dish as awesome or awful.

The team behind Dish.fm is based in Moscow and initially attempted to roll out the application in June.  Back then, the foodie application was based on crowdsourced images and reviews.

“We realized that like this the app attracts only niche users, those who like to make pictures of their food and share the experience,” co-founder Zhanna Sharipove said to TNW. “The mass-market consumer does not bother to make pictures, he or she only wants to get recommendations about what’s to order and be done.”

Making use of information that’s already on the Web sounds like a solid solution, but an app can only rely on this model if New Yorkers and San Francisco residents actively try different food and share their experience. It also depends on how accurately the app processes these reviews and searches for images.

To try the app out for yourself, head over to Apple’s App Store or check out their website.