Kiwi app review: Menus.co.nz

Hungry?

The team over at Yellow have recently released their latest creation: Menus.co.nz, an app to accompany the website of the same name. Carrying out a similar function to the long-established MenuMania app, Menus.co.nz is designed to help you choose a restaurant or bar based on proximity or budget. But does it deliver the goods in gourmet style, or does it plonk it all in a torn take-out bag? Keep reading for the low-down.

Main Menu

Upon firing up the app, menus.co.nz asks you for permission to use your current location. Once you grant it access, it will immediately start suggesting venues around you at the top of the screen, or you can choose to search for a venue via the ‘what’ and ‘where’ dialogue boxes, or browse via categories.

The ‘what’ and ‘where’ facility works very much like it does in Yellow – i.e. it’s a bit hit and miss. First, it’s not clear what they are wanting you to put in the ‘What’ box: is it a venue type, a cuisine type, or an ethnicity? For example, ‘Indian’ appears to be a category, but ‘Curry’ doesn’t. Conversely, ‘American’ doesn’t appear to be a valid category, but ‘Burgers’ does.

Secondly, the results it returns are flawed. For example, when testing this in the centre of Christchurch, entering the term ‘pub’ didn’t return any results for anywhere less than 2km away from my current location, and only four in total (one of them being in Lyttleton…). There are dozens of pubs that serve good food in Christchurch, from the Bard-on-Avon to the Twisted Hop: where are they?

Just two Mexican restaurants in Chch CBD apparently

Also, searching for ‘American’ (and expecting it to return the likes of Denny’s, Lone Star, Burger King etc.) actually returns no results at all, and ‘Mexican’ returns just two results when I can think of at least five. One that I can think of that doesn’t turn up is The Flying Burrito Brothers, yet if I search for it by name it is indeed in the database. If I search for ‘Burgers’, I get several results for McDonalds, but the closest branch of Burger King it lists for me is more than 5km away, which is not right.

The ‘Jump to’ menu is also confusing. There are seven categories listed, which are all types of establishment such as Cafes, Takeaways etc., and which you scroll through much like you would scroll through the options in a drop-down box, but when you reach the end of the list it repeats the categories in an endless loop so that on first glance you feel slightly overwhelmed and confused as to whether there is something different about the second set of repeated options, or the third… but then you realise that it’s just repeating and you’re left wondering why.

Once you’ve figured that out, you pick a category – for example, ‘restaurant’, at which point you might expect to be able to further refine your choice by cuisine type, fully-licensed, BYB etc., however you can only filter by budget which is a little disappointing and leaves you with an overwhelming list of every restaurant around you.

The 'Back' button

Once you’ve found yourself a few steps into a search and you want to go back up a level, it’s a fairly well established iPhone convention to have a backward-pointing arrow on the top left of the screen that takes you back, one step at a time. Menus.co.nz have tried to ‘improve’ upon this by extending the button slightly so that the tip of the arrow takes you straight back to the top layer. It’s a nice idea in theory, but in reality it simply doesn’t work. The ‘home’ part of the button is just too small and too difficult to press when you do want to use it, and when you don’t want to go all the way to the top layer, you invariably end up hitting it by mistake with no way of undoing that action. It’s also unnecessary and breaks with convention. We’re iPhone users and we know that we go back one screen at a time.

The results are listed in groups of twenty and are sorted by distance with an indication as to how long it would roughly take to walk to them, which is a neat touch. At the bottom of the screen is a slider where you can refine the radius of your search. The options in terms of minimum and maximum radius seem to change depending on the number of results returned by the category you’re looking at. Sometimes you can search for upto several kilometers, but the broadest search terms (such as browsing the ‘restaurant’ category) has a limit of 0.8km.

Venue details

Tapping on one of the results brings up further details of your chosen venue, including (where available) information such as opening hours, maps, links to websites, links to place a phone call, and the ability to read and write reviews. This is all great stuff and I can’t complain about the way this has been implemented, but the glaring omission that I find mind-boggling for a site called ‘menus.co.nz’ is the menus! Are you kidding me? Where are they?!

The overall look and feel of the app is very nice, and is in keeping with the menus.co.nz website (which I hadn’t heard of or visited before reviewing this app) and as much as I want to like it and recommend it to all my friends to install and use on their phones, there are just too many flaws that outweigh the good points, and the crux of the matter is that the search engine underpinning the whole thing is just as broken as the Yellow one, so I assume it is built on the same platform.

When we pointed out the flaws in Yellow’s search engine results, and when others started giving poor reviews to the Yellow app in the App Store, the Yellow team said they were working on improving its accuracy but we are yet to see this happen. The Yellow internet search engine has been around for at least ten years now and (in my personal observation) has enjoyed only marginal improvements during that time. There have been cosmetic improvements, but the core of the service – the search engine – has remained flawed. I don’t know why, but I find it very frustrating.

Menus.co.nz

If I go to menus.co.nz (the site, not the app), and search for ‘American’ in ‘Christchurch City’, the resulting page says “You searched for American in New Zealand.” No I didn’t! And the first result is a South American restaurant in Auckland(!), the second result is a Belgian restaurant in Wellington, and the third result is an American restaurant (yay!) in Wellington (bugger). There are then three further results in Wellington, Rotorua, and Auckland, only one of which is actually American and none of which are in Christchurch. It is useless to me in its current state.

Please, Yellow: fix your search engine. It is broken. We love that you’re investing in iOS devices and we know that once your search engine works properly your apps will be fantastic and genuinely useful but until then we just can’t recommend them in actual everyday use as the results they return are flawed and in the market you operate in the results are everything.

– Menus.co.nz app

Have you tried Menus.co.nz? What do you think of it? Sound off in the comments.