Tag: food

Jeddah Food, The Online Restaurant Guide Launches iPhone App

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Jeddah FoodJeddah Food, the English language online restaurant guide to restaurants in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, recently announced the launch of their new iPhone mobile application.

The application enables visitors to Jeddah, as well as locals, quickly find restaurants around the city, based on your current location, while on the go. It provides a search functionality to look for specific restaurants and cafes around Jeddah, as well as quick categories that enables users to click through directly and locate places by type of cuisine (e.g. Lebanese, Japanese, Burgers etc.)

For each venue, the application provides the venue details, phone numbers, website details, photo galleries, and maps.

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Restaurant Review Service Qaym Releases New Version

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QaymQaym, the Arab website for user generated restaurant and coffee shop reviews, that was previously reviewed here, recently celebrated the launch of it’s new redesigned interface and additional features.

Qaym is an online project through which users rate and review restaurants and coffee shops, in addition to uploading pictures of them and their food items, discussing their positives and negatives and posting relevant information about them.

Each restaurant has its own page that contains information about it (including location, branches, type of offered food, etc.) and reviews of the people who visited it and tried its food, which can range from enthusiastic delight to obvious disappointment. There’s a gauge in each page showing the average user rating of the restaurant.

The new version includes a re-branding for the service, introducing a new logo, and a new more simplistic and organized design for the homepage, as well as some other design tweaks for the inside pages.

An important new feature that has been introduced is the ability to pinpoint the location of a restaurant and its different branches on a map; to make it easier for people to find them. This is done through the integration of Google Maps.

Other than that the site’s rating system has been enhanced and extended to allow users to rate each other’s reviews, posts and photos.

The site currently focuses on food and drink establishments, and intends to expand so that the community can rate and review any charged service or product, ultimately aiming to provide an honest, user- and consumer-driven community in which people’s real experiences are shared and published so that they can be the basis of people’s decisions to buy or use a product or service, instead of attractive advertisements and ubiquitous billboards.

Dine In UAE, UAE Restaurants Guide And Reviews

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Dine In UAEDine In UAE is a service that aims to be a comprehensive United Arab Emirates’ restaurant directory on the web, serving as a central point, introducing people to good restaurants all over the UAE.

It also helps restaurant owners promote the new and unique aspects of their restaurants while providing diners with an effective way to find and try new restaurants.

Users can search restaurants by name, by area or by cuisine, or go through the highest rated restaurants and most popular ones, to find details about these restaurants, their addresses, telephone numbers, opening hours, ratings, user reviews and comments.

Registered users can rate restaurants they’ve gone to and post their personal reviews of them.

A forum is integrated in the website to add more interaction between the community of users on several food related subjects like dining at home, sharing recipes, special offers and more.

Restaurant owners can add their restaurants and menus to the website by filling out an offline form. Restaurants have to pay AED 2,000.00 (~ $540) to be included in the directory. Obviously, it’d be much more practical if they could take this process online soon.

Dine In UAE screenshot

Dine In UAE was launched by Siankar Comm LLC.

# Dine In UAE

Resto Tunisie, Community Powered Directory Of Restaurants in Tunisia

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Resto TunisieResto Tunisie, is a Tunisian website that aims to become a comprehensive directory of restaurants in Tunisia, aiding people to make their decisions on which eatery to pick.

The site’s users as well as restaurant owners get to suggest restaurants for addition, by filling out a contact form, specifying the address of the restaurant and why they think it should be included.

Site visitors can navigate through the restaurants in a number of different ways; either by specialty, budget, and top voted for example; or by searching directly for a certain restaurant or using the advanced search to combine different criteria to find the best restaurant for their needs.

On each restaurant’s page, visitors will find the restaurant’s details, specialty, its address, phone numbers, website, whether it servers alcohol or not, and a little description of it. The restaurant is also located on a map (using Google maps) to make finding it easier, along with other nearby restaurants.

Users can also use this page to cast their votes on the restaurant in the three areas of Decoration, Service and Food; as well as leave their reviews and comments on it.
By logging in to their accounts on the site, users can always come back to find the list of restaurants they favorited and reviewed.

A little zone in the website also provides a list of job openings at some restaurants.

Resto Tunisie Screenshot

The service was developed by Tunisian web agency WebCarré, and currently has 327 restaurants in its database.

The design is really nice; the site is pretty easy to use and to surf around. The only thing I think they should consider is opening up addition of restaurants by the users more, letting users fill in the restaurant’s details, position it on the map and all, with them going over all submissions later on, checking there are no duplicates and that the content is good. It should make the service livelier and easier for them to maintain.

# Resto Tunisie

Talabia, Free Online Food Home Delivery Service

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TalabiaTalabia is a new home delivery company that was launched in Kuwait in December 2007, initially using offline call center services, with the objective of providing a free home delivery service for the leading food products in Kuwait, making it more convenient for consumers to order fresh and frozen food products from the comfort of their own homes and have them delivered to their doorstep.

In April 2008, they took their service online, through a site available in both Arabic and English, bringing their home shopping experience to all connected households in Kuwait.

The site is very well designed, simple and easy to use; it incorporates a well organized and categorized product catalog, making it straightforward to find the products you’re looking for, add them to your shopping cart and place your order; also giving you the possibility to specify your preferred delivery time.

Talabia screenshot

Talabia currently delivers products from leading food brands including Sadia, Hilal, Lamb Weston, Gulfa, Hana and Hayat; and they plan to continue adding more quality brands and products to cover more of the consumers’ needs.

The Talabia website was developed by Olive Interactive.

# Talabia

Wasfati: Recipes, Nutrition And Health Portal

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WasfatiWasfati, which stands for ‘My Recipes’ in English, is a new service that was recently launched to cover the needs of Arab food and cooking aficionados, as well as those interested in nutrition and health tips and articles, by providing a place where users can centralize and save their favorite recipes and articles; those they post themselves or others they find and like by other users.

The service aims to replace those bits and pieces of paper and ripped out magazine pages that people have around their kitchens with little recipes or articles here and there, by taking them online, enabling people to share their recipes, tips and articles with others.
The website users can rate and comment on each others recipes and articles, save them in their list of favorites for future reference, forward them to a friend or submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.

The site which is entirely in Arabic, is very well designed and very simple to surf around. You can find your way by category (Recipes or Articles) and their subcategories, by viewing submissions from specific users, by checking out certain tags, by viewing the most recent recipes or selected recipes and articles, or by using the search engine to find what you’re looking for.

Wasfati screenshot

Wasfati is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and was developed with Olive Interactive.

# Wasfati

Otlob, Free Online Food Ordering Service

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Otlob is a free online food ordering service that was first launched in Egypt back in 1999, and which has expanded to three other countries in the Middle East ever since: Saudi Arabia (Riyadh & Jeddah), United Arab Emirates (Dubai) and Bahrain.

Otlob provides its users with the complete menus of their favorite restaurants, enabling them to order meals online easily and quickly; they can even add comments with their order if they need to be specific about certain details.

Users can also save their favorite orders so as to save time the next times they need to order the same meals, they can order from a number of restaurants at the same time, and set the delivery time of their choice.

Restaurants are organized by category and by the neighbourhoods they serve to, and their latest menus are available on the website for users to choose from.

The interface is very well designed, really simply and easy to use; and it comes in two languages: English and Arabic.

Otlob was developed by LINK Development, and manage by LINKonLINE, both subsidiaries of LINKdotNET, an Orascom company.

# Otlob

Qaym, User Generated Restaurant Reviews

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Qaym is a Saudi based service, built around user reviews and social rating of restaurants and eateries from around the world, that just came out of private beta and launched publicly.

Users fully generate the content for the service through their contributions; Every restaurant gets a page, which shows the current user rating for it, tags that describe what the restaurant offers, a list of the countries and cities that restaurants has branches in, as well as reviews and photos submitted by users.

The way the content is organized, you not only get access to reviews of certain restaurants you want to check out before going to, but you can also access a directory-like listing of all restaurants, or of eateries in a certain country or city.

The idea behind it is quite simple and straight-forward, as is the interface and design, which makes it all the better and easier to use. The interface is in Arabic only for the time being.

Saudi Jihad al-Ammar is behind this project, he began working on it last year, and beta tested privately for a bit over 9 months before launching last week.