Patrick Properties

I finally did it. I broke down and bought an iPhone. They’re great gadgets for so very many reasons (paying bills, booking airline tickets, checking the weather, digging through an overstuffed purse with the flashlight app) but I have definitely found a favorite app among the myriad of options that I use much more often than the rest. It’s called urbanspoon and I gotta say, I don’t know how my incredibly indecisive self got along before it. 

The basic gist is similar to a Vegas-style slot machine. The phone reads where you are located and when you shake it, it spins three dials and spits out a restaurant option for you nearby. You can filter your results based on what part of town you are interested in, what style of food you’re craving or how much you want to spend. For example, say you want a restaurant on the Charleston peninsula that serves dim sum. Lock those in, shake it up and it might suggest Fish. Cool, right? Not only that, but after it gives you the restaurant choice you can read reviews, see ratings, pictures, menus, etc. until you find a place that you’d like to try. I have discovered no less than three fantastic local restaurants by using this app. You don’t have to have an iPhone to use this wonderful little tool either, the website works the same way and is a great way to solve the age old question, “what’s for dinner?”

In related news, one of Fish’s sous chefs, Trung, took a video of the moo shu eating contest we hosted at the farmers market last weekend on his phone. It just amazes me how far media has come. You can take a photo or video on your phone and upload it to facebook or twitter and have people viewing and commenting within minutes. From a phone. Remember the good ol’ days when you needed a camera that held negatives that you had to manually wind and it took a week to get the film back? And remember the anticipation and excitement of flipping through the never before seen photos from so-and-so’s birthday party for the first time? There’s no app for that.