New restaurant website: Smorgie.com

This sponsorship is brought to you by Smorgie.com who we have partnered with for this promotion.

There's a new website you may want to check out, Smorgie.com. It allows you both to search for local restaurants and to create your own lists of go-to places in your home town or places you've traveled. I've played around with it a bit and it's pretty easy to use. A search for local pizza or Italian places yielded a pretty solid list of establishments, any of which I could add to my own personal list with a mouse click. And it was easy to add places myself, which other users can read about and add to their own personal lists. You can also easily share your lists with friends through facebook, twitter, email, or on smorgie itself.
There are all sorts of ways to research restaurants in various cities, and they can be hit or miss in terms of their reliability. Some sites seem mostly like a magnet for people who have had bad experiences, while others are full of suspiciously rave reviews ("A+++! The best!"). So the more research tools, the better - you'll get to know which are trustworthy or not.
The ability to create personalized lists helps differentiate Smorgie's from other sites. One of Smorgie's best features is that it allows you to put your entries into whatever categories you choose, like "pizza," "lunch places," "bars," "romantic restaurants," "places to check out" - it's up to you.
You can also search by category, although it may take a while for Smorgie, which is still in its beta stage, to refine that aspect. A search for "sports bar" in Rochester did yield some relevant results like The Distillery and Matthew's, but also Dog Town, which is a hot-dog place (perhaps there was some confusion with the Dog House bar on West Ridge?). But I think that as more user input comes in, that will work itself out.
For Rochester-area pizza, of course, there's no better resource than where you are right now , but I rely on as many search tools as I can find in trying to hunt down local pizzerias, as well as on those occasions when I want a break from pizza. I'll be checking out Smorgie for both.