[hkuo]

Allow me to offer you an idea:

When I go to Yelp to search for a restaurant, the filters I have available are type of restaurant, proximity, rating and price. My next step is to either sort by those filters, or individually click a restaurant. Looking at an individual restaurant, my options for consideration are photos of the restaurant, consisting of either interior/exterior or images of the food, and user reviews. The user reviews consist of reviews about the service, atmosphere and food, but I have to chug through each review to get this type of specific information. And with a task of choosing a restaurant and having to repeat these sets of actions is immensely tedious.

What's missing?

A way to discover restaurants near me that I can discover by their actual dishes. The user flow would be this -> I'm in the mood for a burger. Show me restaurants that serve burgers. I get a range of places from diners to more high-end to delis and more, but instead if getting a list of joints, I get a sortable grid of user's burger photos from places near me. Then, all I need to do is say, that burger is the one I want and, barring other misc info such as price or needing reservations and what not, I will go there and get the burger that I saw with my own eyes.

The advantage you will have over Yelp is that While Yelp provides a way to discover restaurants by very general filters, you will provide a way to directly discover restaurants by the actual individual dishes.

As a side note, think about when you go to a restaurant and get a menu that has pictures. It gives so much more reference to choosing a dish, because the mystery is taken out of the equation. Your service would do exactly this. Remove the mystery of what you're going to a restaurant for.

Also, while you can see some food items on Yelp in the individual restaurant pages, #1 they come with no context and #2 I can only access these photos on these individual pages which is tedious.

There you have it.

[hkuo]

Just want to add that of course, you'd be able to integrate food ratings, friending, favoriting, etc etc etc all that standard social stuff, but IMO, in order for this to be successful, you should consider boiling it down to the absolute simplest of functions and tasks to minimize user friction.

So with the above idea, I would recommend the user need only simply 3 things: 1) photo 2) restaurant 3) whether they liked it or not and an optional 4) description.

If it's an iPhone app then you automatically pull geolocation, but if it's through email, I'm not sure how this would be done and you'd have to explore what you can do.