I happened upon UEatCheap recently and decided to give their service a test drive. What do they do? You type in a city or ZIP code, and they’ll show you a map with color-coded pushpins on it, depicting various nearby dining establishments that provide meals for under $10.
Yes, for many, eating a meal under $10 is a bold claim and in these tough economic times (I love referencing that over-used phrase), there’s a lot of people not used to grub eating that may need some extra assistance. UEatCheap is for them. (Of course, those folks should diligently review GrubGirl’s archives, since eating a meal for under $10 is, well, a mainstay of everyday life.)
Here’s the quick summary:
Pros:
- Visual map of restaurants, that is filterable by genre. Though this is probably a simple Google Maps integration, I do appreciate that the Chinese restaurants have one color of pushpin, and the Indian ones have another. I don’t think Yelp does that. And let me tell you, near my ‘hood, there are a lot of cheap Chinese restaurants (duh).
- Decent inventory of restaurants. They look like a young site, and yet they have enough content on their site so that you, too, can find some restaurants in your neighborhood. (With my bias, I only searched around San Francisco.) They may not have all the ones that GrubGirl has found, but I think those are meant for a competing website, “IEatSUPERCheap.com”.
Now for some areas of improvement. They seem to be new, so I don’t really want to call these areas “Cons”.
Improvement Areas:
- Comprehensiveness. I clicked on a few pushpins and only got directory-like information. They need a lot more reviews on this site, which typically come from a very small percentage of visitors. But what’s to motivate a person to write a review here if they usually do it on Yelp? Maybe if I could bookmark my favorites into my personal black book of hot restaurants, I could be inspired.
- Real finds. My other concern is how the site will provide me with some real finds, without a community of volunteers having added those finds yet. It’s a no-brainer that the low margin food genres (like Chinese or Mexican food) will appear pervasively on this map. But what about the cheapest French or Korean restaurant?
Overall, this is a fun site for me to use to discover new reasonably-priced places to try. They’re starting with a great foundation, and need some more depth to their content that will surely come in due time. For now, use this as a fun decision maker for you when you want to try out a local restaurant nearby.