The On-Line Gourmet

Best of the Web

Dining guides can steer busy executives to the perfect restaurant. But not every site provides a four-star experience

Forget the guidebooks and the regional magazines. Whether you're seeking a bistro in Baltimore, a steak house in Silicon Valley, or a cafÉ in Cincinnati, the Web's the place to turn for the hottest, freshest dining data available. Right?

Well, not exactly.

True, there's a smorgasbord of online restaurant guides, covering big cities and small towns in every state (and, in a few cases, overseas locations as well). But the quality and quantity of the information that those sites dish up varies as widely as the places they promote.

We set out to identify the best online dining guides for busy executives seeking a quiet, elegant spot to close a business deal or a beer-and-pizza joint halfway between an airport and a hotel. We eliminated several sites that seemed too regional, too specialized, or too limited. That left us with nine major dining guides, all of them searchable and many with extras such as online reservation systems, free recipes, and driving directions.

Then we recruited four CEOs who dine out frequently to assess the sites for us. We asked them to sample broadly from the Internet buffet, using the guides to look up their favorite restaurants and to find new ones. Their conclusion: like the restaurants themselves, online dining guides have their specialties. Even the best guides won't necessarily please every palate. As John Diehl, the globe-trotting CEO of a Chicago-area high-tech company, puts it, "No single site has it all."

That's undoubtedly why our reviewers -- with their widely divergent tastes -- made their top picks from all over the menu. For Seattle PR executive Bob Silver, it was a toss-up between Citysearch, with its elegant design and comprehensive content, and the clean, almost spartan Zagat site, Zagat.com, with its best-in-class search engine. "Citysearch is lush, rich, and flavorful, like an evening visit to a Parisian supper club," said Silver, who tests new recipes on friends and relatives on weekends. "Zagat is a trip to a delightful Asian restaurant that is spare in its surroundings but deliciously surprising and satisfying." Rob Marler, a Florida E-tailer who dines out about seven times a week, also recommended Citysearch, saying it had "a lot to offer" and was "easy to navigate." Manhattan marketing executive Jill Gabbe, who reads cookbooks for fun, praised Zagat.com for its "high-quality, reliable information" and Menus.com for its online reservation service and restaurant menus. Diehl, who spends more time in restaurants than in his kitchen, gave kudos to DineSite.com for both its design and its wealth of content on topics such as wine selection, etiquette, and regional cuisine. What's more, he called Fodors.com the best guide for finding restaurants overseas.

On the downside our four critics complained that some E-guides -- including two that we subsequently dropped from our survey at their recommendation -- simply listed restaurants without critiquing or rating them. "I could find the same information in the yellow pages," sniffed Marler. Other sites, including some that made our final cut, sometimes forgot to use the Web's special ingredient: the capability to constantly update content, adding new establishments and removing the listings of restaurants that had closed.

Overall, though, our panelists believed that the best of the online dining directories were a helpful alternative to traditional hard-copy guides. But Gabbe, our New York tester, will also rely on her tried-and-true method of selecting a dining spot: "I'll ask a friend or have the person I'm meeting with make the call."

Citysearch
What it's good for: Speedy searches of comprehensive listings, especially for big cities.
Don't waste your time if: You're looking for nearby suburban restaurants; one user's search returned listings up to 40 miles away.
What our CEOs had to say: "Wow! This site has it all: great content, speed and ease of use. ... the filet mignon of dining guides." "Sleek, attractive site. ... I really liked the sidebar descriptions of atmosphere and price."

CuisineNet
What it's good for: Basic restaurant listings, supplemented with customer reviews and food-related articles.
Don't waste your time if: You want the latest information or the most independent restaurant critiques.
What our CEOs had to say: "It included reviews for a restaurant in my hometown that was bulldozed a year ago." "The site's proprietary content has a chamber-of-commerce feel to it."

Dine.com
What it's good for: Customer reviews, including many for establishments in small communities.
Don't waste your time if: You frequent only spots that are recommended by professional restaurant critics.
What our CEOs had to say: "What a list! Even a small town of 900 people had its restaurants listed."

DineSite.com
What it's good for: Listings for communities of all sizes, book reviews, and customer comments about restaurants.
Don't waste your time if: You want comprehensive, detailed restaurant reviews.
What our CEOs had to say: "The best of the bunch. I will bookmark this one." "The basic information is fine. But the site lacks depth and detail."

Fodors.com
What it's good for: Basic info on a limited number of restaurants in major cities.
Don't waste your time if: You want a list of every eatery in town; the site features selected listings.
What our CEOs had to say: "The only guide with restaurants in international cities." "Search by Name feature is hard to find." (Editor's note: The site features an alphabetical listing called Sort by Name but doesn't provide the capability to search by a specific restaurant name.)