In this week's paper I wrote about my experiences testing some of the city's new food delivery services. One of the reasons restaurant delivery is ready for disruption, pardon the phrase, is that San Francisco's delivery options are pretty weak -- especially compared to a city like New York's.
Everyone I know in New York uses Seamless GrubHub, but it's not without its problems. Eater has a troubling report from the Tribeca Citizen that discovered that one Chinese restaurant was selling its food under four different names. Eater NY also recently found one Chinatown restaurant apparently using three different names on Seamless. Not saying that this is happening here in S.F., but the biggest reason I don't use the service is because it's overrun with restaurants I've never heard of, so I wouldn't be shocked if some of the same shenanigans were happening here.
See also: Filler App: How Tech Companies Are Disrupting Restaurant Delivery
Data. Sometimes it illuminates patterns and trends that the human brain didn't pick up on, and sometimes it's downright misleading. The latter is the case in Yelp's new list of "Top 100 Place to Eat" in the country, compiled by Yelp engineers.
"This method takes into account both star rating and number of reviews to reveal which spots not only have top notch ratings, but also which are most popular in the Yelp community," explains the blog post re: its methodology, which seems pretty logical, but as you will see from the choices it worked better in theory than in practice.
See also: Yelp's New Wordmaps Show Where to Find Bacon and Yuppies
Horner's Corner launched this month, and at first glance is a spiffed up improvement over the Noe's Bar & Basso's restaurant that was there. According to the restaurant's blog, there was an opening chef in place who has since parted ways with the owners. The bar half at Horner's Corner may be a draw for drinks and sports watching via TV, but food-wise the British pub-style options sound good if a tad spendy given the casual digs: melty beef short ribs, pizza, brick chicken, salads, burgers and local cod & chips with a bottle of vinegar on every table to insure authenticity. On a recent weeknight, I ordered the fish and chips because the fries were of the usually desirable Kennebec variety and the overall dish proved to be good and huge.
