The Ten
Maps and Mash
Google maps plus food equals a cartographic cornucopia
Cartography hasn’t been this cool since Columbus. Google created a monster when it released the code to its mapping interface in 2005. Now everyone can pinpoint their favorite hamburger, cream puff, Sidecar, and Syrah. We’ve listed a few of the more useful, charming, or eccentric maps here.
1. Bars. The map on New York on Tap responds to the way New Yorkers think, overlaying its 1,800-plus bar icons on a subway map, which makes it instantly clear what’s most convenient. You can search by category—pool, Irish, lounge—or register and devise a personalized version. For cost-effective drinking in Chicago, Milwaukee, Baltimore, or Washington, DC, bookmark Drinktown. Its bar maps include nightly specials, although the site’s still spotty. Still, there’s obvious potential for a more thorough and national version of the site. The Random Pub Finder has a lovely map of London with what looks like red poker chips scattered across it; each chip is a bar, linked to a smart, witty in-house review with info on the nearest tube stop.
2. Beer. The Beer Mapping Project offers more than 30 city and country maps labeling breweries, brewpubs, beer bars, and beer stores, but its real strength is that these places aren’t randomly chosen. Founder Jonathan Surratt cares about good beer, and this map’s unlikely to steer you wrong. Each icon is linked to reviews on beer-aficionado sites. Place Mapper covers the astonishing beer scene in Oregon and Washington; Portland alone has a preposterous 52 breweries and brewpubs listed.
3. Wine. For touring oenophiles, Wines and Times, a map of wineries across the United States, is a terrific tool. The winery icons have hours and website info, and the whole map can be sorted by what’s open by week.
4. BYOB. You’ve got wine—where do you take it? BYOB restaurants are mapped in Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York.
5. Menus. The best current version of a national menu map includes seven cities and claims to list 16,108 menus (they link to MenuPages). If you search your neighborhood, you’ll discover holes, but you’ll also find restaurants—that Lebanese hole in the wall?—that you thought were personal secrets. Still, the larger a map’s area, the less likely that it’ll reflect what’s really on the ground. Single-city mashups are often the best; San Diego residents have FoodieView to track down the best cheap eats and local hangouts. Residents of other cities can create their own on Wayfaring, which already includes dozens of random food maps, like this food mashup of Northampton, Massachusetts.
6. Cheap eats. Burritophile, the project of Dan Johnson, includes 1,000-plus reviews of burrito places across the United States, with the focus on California. The site includes a burrito blog, an articles section (“How to Keep Your Burrito Hot on a Road Trip”), and sentences like, “It’s rare that a burrito will have ingredient integration that keeps getting better and better” (El Castillito, San Francisco). Two charming but more modest efforts are Los Taco Trucks, a passionate digest of Seattle taco trucks with photos and reviews, and a map of the dirt-cheap food carts in downtown Portland, Oregon.
7. Chocolate/desserts. YummyBaguette.com, run by a pair of Toronto residents who seem to always eat dessert first, rates pastry and chocolate shops (with baguette icons, of course) in seven cities. The listings are best for Toronto, New York, and, oddly, Bangkok. (Scroll to the bottom of each list for the map.) The site must be a blood relative of Chocomap, an international guide to chocolate shops created by the Ecole Chocolat in Vancouver. It’s sleekly designed and a pleasure to browse.
8. Peripatetic bloggers. Bloggers review restaurants, and you want to know where they are. Enter Google. A number of bloggers have implemented mapping, including Hedonia, D.C. Foodies, and the sister site to LA.foodblogging, LA Eats.
9. Least necessary. That’s probably fastfoodmaps.com. The utility of this map is hard to grasp—aren’t fast-food places everywhere?
10. Oddest. The League of Awesomeness’s If the Earth Were a Sandwich lets you see the opposite point on the earth from any point you select. It’s got nothing to do with food, despite having “sandwich” in the name. We think it’s funny.
Nicholas Day is a freelance writer who lives in Chicago, where he also eats.
Check out the "restaurants at night" maps on Urbanspoon. These show every restaurant in a city. Here's New York, for instance: http://www.urbanspoon.com/a/3/New-Yor...
Urbanspoon also covers LA, Chicago, Boston and Seattle.
Thanks for the review Nicholas, it is always good to see that people are using the page. I'm always looking for suggestions on improvements, and if there are any you would like to make feel free to contact me.
I've been using maps personally for years to keep track of restaurants that I want to go to. It's very much like a blog. It's a list of things I find on the internet. I just organize it with mapping software instead of traditional blog software. And I don't really think of it as something that I publish for general consumption. It's something I do for my own benefit like a personal diary.
After a couple years I already had a couple hundred local (local=Cleveland) independent restaurants on the map. Having this list organized geographically comes in handy when you're eating with someone who isn't willing to drive 45 minutes to eat a tasty sandwich. It's also nice because I can organize the restaurants by tag and keep them together with restaurant websites and reviews. I use Tagzania, by the way. The best part is that the information is available as GeoRSS and KML so that it's not locked in. When a better mapping solution comes along I can migrate with ease. (*knock* *knock*)
More recently, I starting including restaurants in other cities. Whenever there's a "best of" list from a source that I trust I add as many as my patience for data entry allows. Ed Levine's pizza list, Gourmet's Top 50, Food and Wine best young chef's, Beard award nominees from 2006 and 2007, Gayot Top 40...
http://www.tagzania.com/user/stu_spivack
As a cartographer, I've made a few detailed maps of San Francisco restaurants for fun. However, lately for practically purposes I use Yelp. As long as you've reviewed the restaurants you want to put on your map (I don't think you actually have to type in a text review if you don't want to), you can add them to whatever list you want to make on Yelp. I've used this on lists that have ranged from the best Silicon Valley lunch options to bars with pub trivia.
Here's my list of lists. Each links to a map that shows every item on that list.
http://www.yelp.com/user_details_list...
Actually one other little known thing about Yelp that's SUPER USEFUL! They have a map feature wherein you can zoom in or out as much as you want over an area, and the highest rated restaurants in that area according to Yelp will be ranked for you. You can also narrow down your search by cuisine.
All you have to do is go to the Yelp home page and scroll down to "Browse by Category." Select "Restaurants" and get started.
Okay, Katya, you just convinced me that Yelp! is worth checking out.
I just wish that Yelp reviews were as trustworthy as Chowhound reviews! Still, if you have an errand near a neighborhood you don't know well, the Yelp map tool showing the highest rated restaurants is a good option.
Nicholas, I'm the author of the site #5, menumaps.monkeythumb.net where after the last update we're up to 20,477 restaurants in 7 cities. Thanks for the kind comments about the site. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the site, please drop me a line. My main goal here is to be able to find places nearby where I am. I'd love to be able to get better sources of data, because the reviews on menupages are sort of worthless. But it's still fun to be able to explore and see what's out there!