Hoppit, A New Photo-Based Restaurant Search App, Debuts

Hoppit, a new and free restaurant search engine app, is the newest way to discover the best restaurants in your neighborhood. The app, founded by Steven Dziedzic and Emad Saghir, is an unconventional "lookbook" where users can search for restaurants based on their mood, who they are with, or the environment of their choice.

The app's currency is photos instead of personal user ratings, making the selection method a lot simpler than sites such as Yelp and Urban Spoon. It's a less stressful process that allows users to choose a restaurant on their own instead of relying on a random person's opinion from a couple of months ago.

"We believed that finding restaurants was too much of a chore," Dziedzic told The Daily Meal. "In order to find a restaurant, you needed to scour through hundreds of reviews to gain insight about a place and then hunt for photos of the interior to see what you were getting yourself into. So we asked, why can't an app do all that for us? An app that could learn about our situation (i.e. what we want, who we're with), read through and understand all those reviews for us, and then show us photos of what it recommends."

And that it definitely does. Users can look up restaurants based on one of 12 ambiences: romantic, hipster, coffee, brunching, cozy, watering hole, vintage, mad men, classy, kid friendly, chill, and business. Or, they can search based on whom they are with: family, "a good book" (aka a party of one), a date, colleagues, your child, or friends. If you need to dig a little deeper, users can look up a specific restaurant, browse by price or geographic location, and read written reviews posted through Foursquare. And in addition to helping users pick where to eat, Hoppit also allows users to browse menus and make reservations through OpenTable.

Even though it just launched, it's already starting to gain some traction. Hoppit has had 75,000 users sign up since its launch, with New York City being one of the hottest spots for "hoppers," providing the app with a third of its traffic. Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles are also on the rise to becoming some of the most popular hopping locations in the United States, and the app can expand to smaller towns as well. Lastly, if you don't even have an iPhone or Android, you can still use the Hoppit website to get the same, simple restaurant search methods as the app.

So basically, there is nothing stopping you from becoming one of the newest hoppers in your town.

 

Skyler Bouchard is a junior writer for the Daily Meal. Follow her on twitter at @skylerbouchard.