Top Five Food-Related iPhone Apps

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Guest Post from John who is a big food fan, and does his best to eat healthily. That said he does have a bit of a softspot for London takeaways and certain nottingham takeaways, as those two cities just seem to bring out the burger fan in him! If you’d like to write a guest post, please see here

The iPhone is an amazing tool and if you’re willing to spend the time looking, you can find an app for pretty much anything.
I recently decided that I wanted to learn to cook better food, and within minutes I’d found a myriad of recipe and cooking related apps. The same thing when I wanted healthy recipes, or to find out how good my local restaurant was, or to find the closest place to eat when I was out in London. The one thing that was annoying though, was having to sort through the apps that didn’t help at all until I found the good ones. So with that in mind, here are the best five I came across, so hopefully you won’t have to spend quite as long searching the app store as I did.

1. Urban Spoon

UrbanSpoon has been around for a while, but is still one of the absolute best food-related apps available. Used by Apple as a demonstration app in 2008 after the launch of the App Store, this app finds restaurants in your vicinity, helping you choose the best, most convenient place for you to eat.
The user interface is extremely good fun to use, and works a lot like a slot machine. You shake the phone and the three slots align to find you a restaurant using three factors; price, type of food and location. Once you have a result, you can either re-shake the phone and try again or if you’re happy with the choice, you can then see the restaurants location, phone number and most impressively, user reviews.
If you’d prefer the process not to be quite so random, you can lock one or two of the slots in place, meaning you can select the location, price range or type of food.

2. Local Eats

This one is only for the US, but I travel there a lot and find this one incredibly useful every time I go. The app lists the best restaurants in the top 50 US cities. Recommended by both the New York Times and USA Today, the app excludes all chain restaurants from its listings, returning only results for local, authentic cuisine.
Once you’ve found a restaurant you might want to visit, the app will give you detailed descriptions of the restaurant, its food and location, as well as driving directions and in-depth user reviews and photos. You can even find coupons and discount promotional codes for the restaurant you’re about to visit.
You can filter you search results by price, type of food, available coupons, serving times or location and it works genuinely well for discovering phenomenal new restaurants when dining in America.

3. Around Me

Around Me is one of the most used apps on my iPhone; it allows you to easily and quickly discover information about your surroundings, wherever you are. So if you’re in the UK, Europe or any major international city and you’re looking for the closest place to grab a bite to eat, this app will tell you where to go.
It’s not just for restaurants either, using the iPhone’s built in GPS, the app finds your position and lets you choose the closest restaurant, supermarket, theatre, taxi rank, bar, bank, cash machine, cinema, petrol station, hospital or hotel.
Once you choose the category you’re looking for, the app then shows you a complete list of all local businesses in that industry, listing them in order of how far they are away from you.
Once you’ve selected a listing, you’ll be able to view it on the map and find the quickest route from your location – you can even email it to a friend if you want them to meet you there.
This is an incredibly useful (and perhaps more importantly, accurate) app and one that I constantly use to find cash points, supermarkets and restaurants whenever I’m about and about, particularly somewhere I don’t know all that well.

4. All Recipes Dinner Spinner

This app is designed to help out with cooking at home, supplying you with thousands of great recipes. This is one of the first apps I downloaded when I decided I wanted to learn to cook, and it’s one of the only ones still installed on my iPhone.
The app provides you with step-by-step recipes for every type of meal imaginable, and while you can simply browse through the myriad of options, you can also search using extremely useful filters. Let’s say you have a few random ingredients lying around the kitchen that you know should make a meal, you just don’t know what. Well with this app you can input the ingredients you have and see what dishes can be cooked using just the ingredients at your disposal. You can also filter by the type of meal you’re after (low fat, high fiber, low carbs, etc) or even by the amount of time you want to spend preparing and cooking the meal.
It’s also quite useful for those who need to be aware of what they’re eating, as it allows you to filter the recipes for vegetarians, vegans, no dairy, no wheat, etc.
This is a great little application for those who want to learn to cook, or just for those who want some new recipe ideas while cooking for themselves or the family.

5. Eat This, Not That

This is an app I found recently, but keep find myself using. Based on the best selling book series, this app is designed to help you eat more healthily and ultimately lose weight. It has a fun and well designed user interface and can be used pretty much anywhere you might need it (in the supermarket, in the restaurant, at home, etc)
The features of this great little app include a calorie tracker, which shows you calorie amounts for over 13,000 menu items and 10,000 groceries, as well as the calories burnt by 230 exercises and activities. You can track and record you weight, allowing you to see at a glance how you’re progressing.
Perhaps the best features though as the restaurant survival strategies and the food comparison chart. The former allows you to see a summary of the best and worst foods available at each restaurant, as well as letting you view nutritional information for over 13,000 adult and children menu items. The latter allows you to compare to foods side-by-side and see which is the healthier option.
A great little app and one that I would thoroughly recommend – the ‘top swaps’ section is particularly useful for finding healthy alternatives to your favourite unhealthy snacks.

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