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Lifestyle

Ness: The App That Knows Your Taste

This article is written by a student writer from the Spoon University at Wash U chapter.

For serious foodies, choosing a restaurant on a Saturday night can be a complicated, daunting process. Yes, there are already websites and apps that rate restaurants based on other people’s reviews, but trusting someone else’s taste in something so personal as food can backfire. Well foodies, great news: there’s an app that solves that exact problem and more.

It’s called Ness, and it suggests restaurants based on the user’s personal taste – it’s like Pandora or Netflix but for food. The app will ask you to rate 10 random restaurants and based on the data it will make suggestions about where to eat next. As you rate more restaurants, the recommendations get more precise and can even estimate how much you’ll like the food. If you’re in St. Louis, the app can recommend a place based on its similarities with restaurants in New York or Boston.

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Further than just recommending a name, Ness has integrated the menu, details about the restaurant (like its hours or cost), photos of the food, and its most popular dishes all into one interface. If you want to hear what other customers have to say, Ness also has top lists of restaurants that allow users to get recommendations and share their own favorite places with friends.

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Ness was voted the “Best of 2012 Apps” by Apple and was listed in the Editor’s Choices for 2013. But best of all, it’s free! Watch out, UrbanSpoon – Nessie exists, and she’s hungry.