At Triposo we have a database of restaurants that we've collected from various open content sources. When we display this list in our mobile travel guides one of the key pieces of information for our users is what cuisine the restaurant has. We often have this available but not all the time. Sometimes you can guess the cuisine just by looking at the name:
"Sea Palace" - probably chinese. "Bavarian Biercafe" - probably german. "Athena" - probably greek.
So based on the technology Jon describes, we created a little interactive feature in our Labs section where you can fill in any restaurant name and see what cuisine it would most likely be. We call it the cuisine guesser. You can type in your own name (I'm an American diner, my wife is a little French bistro), your favorite singer (Shakira does Sushi) or finally find out what they will be serving in the restaurant at the end of the Universe. As the logo below suggests it's American.
Obviously, the mechanism works best if you use real restaurant names and not people's name. It's actually kinda fun we think to just type in restaurant names and see what happens. We think It's most fun if you set yourself some sort of target.
Here are a few challenges we like:
- What is the name of the quintessential Chinese restaurant?
You're allowed to use three words only. The score to beat is 11.12 which is the score of "Golden Dragon" - Can you find a restaurant name that scores well both on vegetarian and on bbq?
You're allowed to use four words here. So far I have not been able to come up with something better than "Vegan Salad BBQ" scoring just over 4 on bbq and under 2 for vegetarian, so I guess there is room for improvement there. - Can you find a restaurant that scores high on eclectic?
The best I could do was "Djanidjan" which has a score of just 2. But I'm afraid it's not really a restaurant name but just a made up word.
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