Posted by Greg Clow in on the web on April 26, 2007 at 10:52 am
Yahoo. Google. Facebook. To most of us, they're indispensable tools in our online lifestyle, but they all began as spare-time projects undertaken by university students. Students who subsequently became rich beyond their wildest dreams. Lucky bastards.
Hoping to someday join the Lucky Rich Bastards Club are Winson Chung and Rhys Causey, two UofT students who have recently launched StartWithSoup.com. Born out of their mutual frustration with trying to find good eats on a student budget, the site is sort of like a Rotten Tomatoes for the local restaurant scene. Reviews from sources including NOW, Toronto Life, BlogTO, Martini Boys - and soon, TasteTO - are compiled along with user reviews, and a unique rating system is used to crunch the aggregated results and assign each location a value out of 100.
Each restaurant is then plotted on a Google Map using colour-coded spoons (green for well-reviewed places, red for not-so-hot ones), allowing site visitors to narrow in on places in their neighbourhood. The map and site search can also be filtered to display restaurants based on type ("sit-down", "fast food", "delivery"), cuisine and price. Throw in sidebar features like local food events and favourite restaurant dishes, and you've got a site that every food-lover in town will want to bookmark.
It's hard to say whether StartWithSoup will ever become as ubiquitous as the sites mentioned above. But with the growth of foodie culture and the increasing popularity of so-called Web 2.0 sites and portals, it's probably a safe bet that there's a ready-made market for the site. And the fact that there's a little "Toronto Edition" banner discretely displayed in the upper-left corner shows that these boys are already thinking ahead. Best of luck to 'em.
