Meet the Food Discovery Site for Foodies ‘Frustrated With Yelp’

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Name: Taste Savant

Quick Pitch: Taste Savant is a food-discovery platform featuring select reviews from trusted sources.

Genius Idea: Users can view menus, make reservations and place delivery orders right from the website.

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If you don't have celebrity chef or food blogger friend showing you the tastiest spots to dine, your best bet is to turn to Taste Savant.

Taste Savant is a restaurant discovery platform that features reviews from select food experts. In a separate tab, the website highlights what your Facebook and Twitter friends are saying about a restaurant.

Only a number of restaurants per city are listed on Taste Savant at a time. The platform pulls reviews from seasoned food critics, celebrity chefs, famed bloggers and industry influencers. Recent food reviews from The New York Times, Tasting Table, The Village Voice, and other publications, are also uploaded onto restaurant profiles. Foodies can log in to the food-discovery platform with a Facebook or Twitter account. Users can also integrate their Foursquare checkins.

Taste Savant is a platform built for savvy eaters. The network appeals to foodies who live to try the hottest new restaurants and find low-key dives.

Taste Savant is the "anti-yelp," Sonia Kapadia, founder and CEO of Taste Savant, tells Mashable.

"Most of the competition is focused on getting as many reviews as possible and building a product that's everything for everyone," Kapadia says. "What's great about Yelp is that you can get thousands and thousands of reviews from users for tons and tons of restaurants. We've done the complete opposite."

Kapadia wants to take the work out of food discovery. Taste Savant is highly curated and focused on a core user base — "The person that's frustrated with Yelp," she says.

Taste Savant's editorial team curates the restaurant discovery site by adding new eateries as they open and taking down shops that don't fare well among the reviewers. "As soon as reviews come out every week, those restaurants get added to our database," Kapadia says.

Industry insiders — plus, your Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare friends — will point you in the direction of their favorites. For example, at April Bloomfield's casual bar and restaurant The Spotted Pig, Taste Savant readers will know to get the deviled eggs and famous ricotta gnudi without question.

SEE ALSO: Internet Rallies Behind 9-Year-Old Food Blogger

The platform also cuts down the work in search. Users can search for restaurants by neighborhood, cuisine, price and occasion. Instead of checking off a large variety of neighborhoods, Taste Savant let's you check off bigger sections of a city.

Taste Savant is a simply a one-stop shop for food. Through its partnerships with OpenTable, MenuPages and Seamless, users can view menus, place reservations or order food directly on the website.

Taste Savant is currently available in New York City. It will be announcing its presence in a new city soon. Taste Savant will continue to expand to major cities.

Would you use a tailored user and critic-generated food review platform? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, eightfivezero.

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Series presented by Microsoft BizSpark

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives software startups three-year access to Microsoft software development tools, marketing visibility to help promote their business and a connection to the BizSpark ecosystem, giving them access to investors, advisors and mentors. There is no cost to join, so if your startup is privately owned, less than three years old and generates less than U.S. $1M in annual revenue, sign up today.