Tech for Food Nerds: Chefs Feed 2.0 Launches Today

Screen shot of the Chefs Feed app

Chefs Feed aims to do much the same thing as our Where the Chefs Eat posts aspire to -- that is, let the food professionals guide you to the places they love to eat. It also aims to act as an alternative to Yelp and other ratings sites -- here, you can follow a chef you trust rather than the anonymous masses. The app points you in the direction of specific dishes rather than just send you to a restaurant, and allows you to search by dish and location. Hungry for a sandwich in Hollywood? Theoretically, the app should help you find a few that different chefs recommend.

I found it much easier to use when searching for a specific dish than when looking for something close to me. While the app says dishes would be listed by proximity, they always appeared in alphabetical order. And when I searched nearby by neighborhood, as the search box prompted, I didn't get anything in the neighborhood and I got the sense that the software wasn't really working as it should -- most suggestions were at least 5 miles away.

When searching by cuisine, though, the app produced some cool results. The search for sushi delivered a decent list of some of the more interesting Japanese dishes at high-end restaurants around the city. You can search by chef and see what their favorite dishes are around town. You can also follow chefs, Twitter-style, and get updates whenever they add new dishes.

The app also has a ton of potential as an incredibly useful tool for travel. When looking at other cities, the lists of dishes suggested by chefs seem far more worthy than the top-rated spots on sites like Yelp or Open Table.

The app includes an impressive lot of Los Angeles chefs, among them Evan Kleiman, John Sedlar, Josiah Citrin, Michael Cimarusti, Michael Voltaggio, Nancy Silverton and Roy Choi.

You can download the app here.