Menuism is the social network for people who love to eat out at restaurants. You can rate what you ate and interact with other local foodies over plate-by-plate reviews and pictures.

Why rate the dishes? Because there are plenty of times when the quality of the restaurant doesn't correlate to the quality of the dishes. You can go to a 5-star restaurant and have a mediocre steak or go to a taco stand and have a 5-star taco. Menuism separates the restaurant ratings and the dish ratings for those who really care about the food they eat.

Menuism helps you find where and what to eat.

Everyone has different taste and on Menuism, anyone can be a food critic. With the social networking features, you can find like-minded foodies and follow their good taste. Interact with them by replying to reviews, sending private messages, or publicly commenting on their profile.

Menuism is built by users for users. Anyone can add restaurants, tag them with attributes, or add dishes to the menu. Put in your favorite restaurants and invite your friends to do the same! If everyone in your community contributes just a little, everyone will have a great resource and eat better.

The name "Menuism" came from our goal to enlighten people about their dining decisions by helping them find what dishes a restaurant serves. Inspired by Buddhism, the core spirit of Menuism is foodies helping other foodies to eat better - whether through contributing restaurant and dish information or writing helpful reviews.

To symbolize the Menuism enlightenment theme, we have our cherubic orange mascot named Foodha (Food + Buddha). Foodha is the fine eating sprit in all of us. He's a constant reminder that we can all eat better if we help each other out. He also reminds us that there's always room for dessert! :)

In the spirit of helping foodies find "what to eat" at restaurants, there are a few ways we try to provide information about the dishes:

• User contributed dishes: Users can either directly enter in a restaurant's dishes, or if they write a restaurant review that has dish ratings, those items will automatically get added to the menu.
• Menu links: To complement the dishes on our site, we also try to aggregate links to all the online menus we can, ranging from the restaurant's own website menu to menu partners like MenuPages, AllMenus, and GrubHub.

If you don't see a menu on a restaurant listing, don't just sit there and complain - go add it! The power to help others is in your hands.

Another way Menuism aims to help foodies is by acting as an online dining journal. On Menuism, there are plenty of ways you can catalog your dining interests and experience:

• Add restaurants to your favorite or try list.
• Write a restaurant review and rate the dishes.
• Upload unlimited food photos and menus.

Whichever way you choose to express your thoughts about a restaurant, Menuism will show it to you wherever you see that restaurant listing on the website. Any time you look at a restaurant page, do a search, or browse the listings, Menuism will show whether you love it, want to try it, have reviewed it, or wrote a special note about it. Give it a try!

Besides Menuism.com, you can keep on all things Menuism on a few other sites:

• Befriend us on MySpace.
• Be a fan of Menuism on Facebook or add the Facebook "Eating" application.
• Follow us on Twitter.
• Link to Menuism.com on your own blog or website.
• Read the blog or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Menuism was founded by John and Justin - two UC Berkeley alumni who love eating and coming up with new ideas. After college and some detours through large corporations, John and Justin kept dreaming of the day when they could do something smaller that was their own. That day finally came in January 2006 at the end of a weekend brainstorm session, where the idea for Menuism was born. Amped up on excitement, opportunity and caffeine, John and Justin both gave their 2-week notices the very next day at work, and have been working on Menuism ever since.

Justin Chen is a software entrepreneur and technology strategist. He is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Delta Beans, LLC, creators of Menuism.com, TheWeddingLens.com and GreenBusinessProject.com. He has held lead technical positions with several companies including Netscape, WeVest (a financial services startup), and most recently Hewlett-Packard, where he was a technology strategist and project manager in the IT services division where he reduced the cost of IT delivery for Fortune 500 companies. His passion for technology has enabled Menuism to scale to millions of page views and profitability on extremely low overhead. He has a BS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, and a MS in Engineering Management from Santa Clara University.

John Li is a technology entrepreneur with strong passion for the rapid development of useful, scalable and profitable online businesses. He is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Delta Beans, LLC - creators of Menuism.com, TheWeddingLens.com and GreenBusinessProject.com. Previously, he held Program Manager and Developer roles in Microsoft's Mobile Devices Division, where he planned and managed feature development on the Windows Mobile platform. His focus on organic growth and SEO has helped drive Menuism's rapid rise to millions of monthly page views with zero marketing spend. John has a BS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and a MS in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

Chuck Templeton is a technology entrepreneur and a student of leadership. His background includes being the founder of OpenTable, Inc., the leader in online restaurant reservations, the founder of Building Block Management, a real estate property management company, and a co-founder and partner in Delta Beans, LLC (Menuism.com, TheWeddingLens.com and GreenBusinessProject.com). In addition, he was the CEO of SignMeUp.com a leading online registration provider for endurance participation events and Acumence.com a yield improvement technology for manufacturers and sits of the Board or acts as an advisor to several other internet companies including Travelpost.com, GrubHub.com and Braintree Payment Solutions among others. Chuck focuses on bringing leadership, vision and focus to the ventures that he works with. He has augmented his professional experience with an MBA from the Kellogg School of Business and a B.S. in Economics from California Polytechnic Institute of San Luis Obispo. He spent three years in the U.S. Army as an Airborne Ranger and is married with a wife and two girls.

Menuism is built with Ruby on Rails, stores data in a MySQL database and is hosted at Engine Yard. It's primarily developed on black Apple MacBooks.

Logo and some design elements are by Julia Tseng at http://www.juliatseng.com

Some icons are courtesy of UK-based developer Mark James at http://www.famfamfam.com.

The following images are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. You can use and modify them for any purpose - all we ask is that you include a link back to Menuism in your credits.

 

These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.