Ever wonder where your city’s most revered chefs eat on their days off? What restaurant would they choose for a first date? Where is their favorite spot to grab late night grub? All of these questions were on the minds of the Chefs Feed team when they came up with the idea to get recommendations from people who actually know what they are talking about — the chefs themselves.
Hungry for more? Satisfy your craving after the jump.
The Basics
Chefs Feed is the foodie bible whose content is created by top-tier chefs. Over 100 renowned chefs from San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have pulled together a list of their favorite dishes and where to get them. The likes of Los Angeles’ Wolfgang Puck and San Francisco’s Michael Mina offer candid suggestions of their favorite eateries, which you can add to a to-do list. The app provides featured restaurants’ vital information, reviews and it will use your location to suggest restaurants in your immediate area that feature the dishes on your to-do list.
Getting Your Grub On
To get started, you can sign in with Facebook, or if you are one of the few people left in the world who doesn’t have a Facebook account, you can register for Chefs Feed directly in the app.
Chefs Feed is the foodie bible.
After you have signed in, you can choose your recommendation location — currently only San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City are available but Chicago, Washington D.C., New Orleans, Seattle, Boston and Philadelphia are on the horizon for later this year.
Chefs Feed has partnered with Virgin America, who is currently featuring the Chef Feed documentary on a number of their flights.
Side note: If you want to flip between one location and another, simply tap the Profile icon on the bottom right of the screen, choose your new location and you will be brought back to the homepage with an animated Virgin America plane flying across the screen. Virgin America is currently featuring a series of short documentaries filmed by Chefs Feed featuring the chosen Chefs and their recommendations for the city that the passengers are headed to.
The Homepage
The homepage has the following features: City’s Best Chefs, Their Favorite Dishes, Feed Me Now, Live Feed and Messages.
Chefs Feed offers a list of personal recommendations from over a hundred top chefs.
The City’s Best Chefs offers a list of the chosen epicurean curators — as in the best chefs. This list is alphabetical by chef name, but the list can be filtered by name or restaurant. Once you tap on a chosen chef, a new page will open with a photo of the chef, the name of their restaurant(s), a list of favorite dishes, and vital stats (accolades, awards, etc.)
Each chef has their own page which features their recommendations, stats and photo.
Each dish has its own page which features the chef who has recommended it, the ability to rate the dish, add it to your to do list, share that you ate it and the restaurant information.
When you tap Ate It, a share option will pop up allowing you to use Facebook, Twitter or email to share your new find.
When you tap on a dish, a new page opens up naming the dish, the restaurant, and offering up candid reviews by the Chefs—like Craig Thornton of Wolvesmouth in Los Angeles says the Poutine dish at Animal (Los Angeles) is “… a punch in the face in the best way possible. Jon and Vinny’s menus are always packed with flavor. They also pack in a great music selection.”
Ratings
At the bottom of the page, you also have the choice to Ate It, Rate It or Plan It. Basically, Ate It keeps track of your epicurean adventures, while Rate It let’s you (you guessed it) rate the item, and Plan It adds the dish to your roadmap of culinary decadence. You also have the option to Map It, which is essentially a Google map pinpointing the exact location of the desired dish.
You can sort through the list of different dishes with a variety of filters.
Their Favorite Dishes is an alphabetical list of dishes and its affiliated restaurant location. You can filter by restaurant, price, if you have “completed” the dish, cuisine, neighborhood, vegetarian friendly and if the restaurant is currently open.
The Feed Me Now page offers a list of close restaurant options, and the Live Feed provides a running feed of updates from both restaurants and chefs.
Feed Me Now is a really cool feature. It uses your location to pinpoint the recommended dishes in your relative area. There is also a map view option for those who need a visual.
The Live Feed is an ongoing feed pulling content from both Twitter and Facebook from featured restaurants and chefs.
Messages features new updates from the Chefs Feed team.
Check Please
Overall, I think Chefs Feed is an ingenious app. Not only is the concept perfect for finding new locations and recommendations that aren’t from Yelp or OpenTable, but the interface is smooth and the idea of making the home screen a restaurant guest check pad is brilliant. The handwritten font is still a running trend among apps and while it may be overkill in a number of apps, I feel that it truly works for Chefs Feed.
The idea itself, is as I said, amazing. Where else will you find a compendium of prestigious chef’s dining secrets. The Feed Me dining component is also a great feature as it utilizes your location to offer suggestions of where to eat.
Essentially, this is the end all be all checklist for foodies and I highly recommend it.