Need to find a good Chinese restaurant in your neighborhood? How about a bagel place near the hotel you’re staying at? What about a dry-cleaner, good dentist, etc.?  You might want to try the free Yelp.com iPhone app.
While there are plenty good “recommendation” apps for the iPhone, especially ones that recommend restaurants (Urban Spoon comes to mind), none offer the depth of quality user reviews found on Yelp. This is because the Yelp app uses the popular Yelp.com website which contains over a two million high-quality user reviews.
Fire up the Yelp.com app and allow it to use your current location for nearby reviews. You can then choose a category or enter any category or business name in the search box.
We chose the restaurant category and were given a list of restaurants in the area sorted by user rating. We could also have filtered our results further by choosing qualifiers like “Chinese restaurant” or “Italian restaurant.”
Once you choose a specific listing the app shows more details along with links to the reviews, contact information and a link to Google Maps to direct you right to the establishment.
My family and I recently used this app when traveling during the holidays in San Diego. We found a reasonably-priced restaurant for lunch, directions to a movie theater/mall and a really fun breakfast place nearby the hotel. We really love this app and for the price, which is FREE, it can’t be beat!
