Vancouver Tech

Since my arrival in Vancouver, I’ve been able to get excellent recommendations on local joints all around town: restaurants, sushi, butchers, grocery stores, coffee shops, sandwiches, pizza, etc.

These are the things everyone needs in a new town. In particular, in the West End, I’ve been introduced to the following:

• Best dry groceries: No Frills
• Best butcher: Tango’s
• Best Lebanese (a requirement for an ex-Montrealer): Nuba
• Best booze with long hours: Dover Arms
• Best Indian: Desi at 911 Denman
• Best sushi (although you really can’t go wrong in Vancouver): Samurai
• Best Mexican: Ponchos at 827 Denman
• Best Italian coffee and sandwiches: Cardero Bottega at 1016 Cardero

I’ve also been playing around with the popular local search and review websites (and iPhone applications): Yelp, Urbanspoon, and Praized.

Certainly, they all take a different angle on recommended places. Yelp gives you options; Urbanspoon helps decide for you with their random generating shake feature (great idea); Praized leverages a person’s existing social network via Twitter and Facebook. But who has the best coverage and review base for Vancouver?

For example, let’s look at pizza around Granville, the heart for late night heart-stopping greasy pizza. (And pizza being the typical mobile internet case study…). Yelp seems to have the most user reviews and uses the 5 star system, which seems most accurate. Urbanspoon has the best integration of votes, expert reviews, blog posts, and user reviews. Praized doesn’t have any submitted user or expert reviews yet, but it’s a new service out here, so stay tuned.

Based on this preliminary look, I’ll go with Yelp for now. I like the iPhone app user interface, and the application just seems more fun to use.

What do you use for local recommendations?

More to look at: Chowhound, Food Vancouver, Martiniboys, EAT! Vancouver, the Straight’s annual Best of Vancouver, etc.