Finding the Way to Order In

Baby its cold outside. The weather has brought us temperatures that we’re not quite ready to handle. Bostonist doesn’t want to go outside and find our next meal. Sitting in our apartment we’re deciding if we’re going to venture out and sit in a toasty restaurant to dig up dinner or if take out or, better yet, delivery is in our future. Where do we turn? The internets of course. Two new services have made themselves know to us in the recent weeks: MenuPix and EatNow.

Walking down the street checking out menus posted in the window may be the hip European thing to do, but it’s hard to see through the ski goggles we’d be wearing if we were outside. In order to make the perfect, shortest, beeline to our destination we’ve checked out MenuPix.com to find out the restaurant and price range perfectly suited for tonight’s dinner. Bostonist used to be an Amazon Menu devotee until we found out that the menus listed weren’t actually current. We talked to the people at MenuPix and they pointed out that at one of our favorite Thai places, House of Siam, Amazon lists soup as 3.50, MenuPix 3.95, Amazon’s entrees listed at $7.50, MenuPix correctly at $8.25. MenuPix has some sweet drill-down features allowing you to find a restaurant by cuisine, price, or neighborhood—it’s even searchable. We’re just a little peeved that when you go to the base URL it comes up with the NYC local menu set. Bostonist asked for it, MenuPix delivered on adding a $ rating to each restaurant based on entrée price. They've also got their sites on a Google Map mashup so you can browse all the restaurants in a given area. Bostonist suggests they team up with Metrobot.

With the wind chill tonight it seems to be a perfect night for delivery over dine-in or take-out. EatNow.com is pretty limited in scope. They have some advanced GPS location devices working on their site to find the restaurants that deliver to your neighborhood. You can order online and have food at your door within an estimated time. EatNow hopes to bank on the College crowd for takeout and have centered their outreach to those communities. You’re better off if ordering in Kenmore Square than you are from anywhere on Centre Street in JP. If you live in Mattapan don’t even bother looking them up. It’s a curious business model as they don’t charge anything extra for their service. We imagine you get a limited set of choices, collected only from delivery joints that pay EatNow to list them. The menus are somewhat difficult to wade through, but the promise of some Shredded Beef and Sesame and an order of Crab Rangoon might be the incentive we need tonight to make it an EatNow evening.

MenuPix offers menus outside the metro's listed, including Amherst, NoHo, and Sunderland in the Pioneer Valley. Bostonist highly reccomends Bub's B-B-Q. The motto there is "pig out in style." We have, and we will, thanks.