Every New Yorker has had the experience of wandering around for hours searching for just the right place to go out for dinner. So many choices, so much money, so many neighborhoods, so little time, so few babysitters. Where do you turn? A plethora of resources — both online and off — stand ready to help you meet this challenge (Zagat, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, the New York Times, Citysearch.com, just to name a few). The latest online restaurant guide to cover the Big Apple dining scene — Savory New York — is also the next in a slew of online repositories for quasi-homemade videos. Having launched just a second ago, April 2006, the site is not nearly as dense as the others. While New York Magazine has 99 restaurants listed in Chelsea and Zagat’s has 93, Savory NY has just 19. What Savory New York does offer that the others do not is videos of the chefs and an aggregation of reviews. Each restaurant listing offers a lot of basic information such as location, specialties, owner, hours, price, year opened, etc. plus links to any restaurant review of the eatery. Note: a nice upgraded feature would be the ability to do a side by side comparison of all reviews.

The videos are what make Savory New York this guide unique and worthy of checking out. Chefs like Tom Colicchio of Craft, Jimmy Bradley of Red Cat and Marc Murphy of Landmarc give you a tour of their restaurants, share the philosophy behind their cuisine and, in some cases, tell you how they chose the restaurant name. You also get to salivate over their signature dishes. To catch the latest videos and restaurant reviews, you can sign up to receive the Savory Tidbits newsletter. Bon appetite!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 1:19 pm and is filed under General, Finds.