If you’ve ever thrown out a flier for Chinese food a week before you wanted to order it, wondered which restaurants in a new city offer your favorite dish, or just want to find a nice spot for a date, an expanding site called DrEats.com should have you covered. Much like MenuPages, which offers an index of digital menus for restaurants in a handful of major cities, Dr. Eats serves up scanned menus from restaurants across the United States, with 20,000 and growing.
The site’s founders profess that they launched it out of their own laziness. “We would find websites that had menus, but there weren’t many listings and we wouldn’t know if we were even within their delivery radius” said Melissa Nichols, co-founder. “We created DrEats.com to be a comprehensive menu database, providing anyone who wants to order in with the perfect one-stop resource for information on nearby restaurants.”
Besides offering menus, the site also allows visitors to order directly through the Web certain establishments. Users pick out what they want then send it to Dr. Eats, which handles payment info and forwards the order on to the restaurant for takeout or delivery.
Visitors can also help build the menu database by submitting menu scans from their favorite establishments. To offer an incentive, Dr. Eats lets contributors accumulate points that can be cashed in for Dr. Eats merchandise, if you’re into that sort of thing. The entire site is free to access at DrEats.com.
