Several of my friends and I have established a new Web site, called "Toronto's WWW Restaurant Listings", at URL: http://www.symsol.com/food/ which went on-line last week and features what we believe to be Toronto's largest and most comprehensive WWW restaurant listings. Currently our database contains nearly 1,100 entries and can be searched according to many criteria, including: - any portion of the restaurant name - any portion of the restaurant address - arbitrary combinations of ANDed or ORed cuisine types - price ranges - geographic regions (eg downtown, north, ...) - city neighbourhoods (eg Yorkville, Beaches, Theatre District, ...) and implicitly ANDed combinations of any of the above. In addition, (after all, we had to pay for it somehow...) participating restaurants' home pages provide more information, such as: - hours of operation - menus - wine lists - beer lists - local area maps - list of facilities - notes of interest - etc. Although the service does have a commercial side to it, we (being the average net users and WWW surfers that we are) tried to design the site to provide maximum utility with minimum superficiality... Rephrased: we want it to be useful! Users who do not have access to a graphical WWW browser can still use lynx or any other text-based WWW browser and will potentially miss out only on the logos and local area maps -- everything else should be accessible (although some restaurants are beginning to put up other images). Please tave a look at our site, tell your friends, add us to your bookmarks, etc. If you visit one of the restaurants listed with us, please let them know that you saw them in "Toronto's WWW Restaurant Listings" - they just might give you a discount, a free coffee, or a free appetizer... ;-) Most of all, email me ([email removed]) your comments telling me what you think of our site (hopefully I haven't said/done anything to deserve a flaming :-) ). Bon Apetit! --Manny Noik
Toronto, Canada