Finding exactly what you want, when you want it.

Happy Friday everyone!

Before I get into today's post, I'd like to thank everyone for coming to our Eat-Up at South of Beale earlier this week. We gave away t-shirts, showed off our mobile apps, met our fabulous users and generally had a blast. We've got more events like that planned for the future so be sure to watch this space!

I'd also like to remind you that it's not to late to enter this week's "Make Mark Eat It" contest. This week's contenders are listed here.

Today I'd like to spotlight one of the most interesting features of MarksMenus and how it helps set us apart from other similar services. Most places will let you search for restaurants by a genre, like "Italian" or "Tex-Mex". One of the problems with this manner of searching is that it's not very specific.

Right now I want for you, the reader, to think of the first dish that comes to mind when I say "Italian Food". Some of you are thinking about a dish like Linguini and some of you are thinking about a big ol' Meatball Sub.

Both of these dishes fall under the category of Italian food, but they are representative of two totally different dining experiences. One of them is something that you can grab during your lunch break, the other will probably involve a nice bottle of wine and a date.

Have you ever noticed that you can tell a lot about a restaurant by their menu? If you see that a restaurant has their wine list on their menu, it's a good bet that you should probably ditch the jeans and the Ed Hardy shirt and throw on some Dockers. The ability to check out a menu *before* you arrive is a great way to know whether or not that great "Italian Restaurant" you're taking your first date to is a place with cloth tablecloths or a pizza shack with a wide-screen TV and a Galaga machine in front of the restrooms.

This is just one of the ways in which we separate ourselves from other search engines. By allowing you to search at the dish level, we can help you find not only the food that you want but set your expectation of the dining experience.