Update! Austin Eats: BBQ for iPhone 1.0 is now available in the app store!

Austin Eats: BBQ

A little over a month ago, I decided to write a Austin BBQ application.  Specifically, I had all of the hungry visitors of SXSW in mind as I did, but I thought even beyond the conference it was be something generally useful.  With the help of some friends, I put together a dataset of BBQ joints (sourced from Yelp, Foursquare, and Gowalla), a mobile-friendly site, and an iPhone client.  Unfortunately, as I write this, the app is still pending review, but I expect (hope?) it will be generally available soon.

Spots

I sourced the original BBQ places list manually and then built the rest of the data using the Yelp, Gowalla, and Foursquare APIs.  The data that those services are incorporating are getting richer all the time.  I also ran an informal BBQ survey here in Austin over the past month to get an idea about people’s favorite places to get BBQ brisket, ribs, turkey, chicken, and sausage.  And yes, some definitely argued that if it’s not meat, it’s not BBQ.  🙂  Regardless, special designation were given to places which folks said had the best of a particular item.

Scores

The scoring system is based on a combination of Yelp, Gowalla, Foursquare, and survey data.

There’s an Austin BBQ mobile site that you can use to pull up the data and an iPhone app (when Apple gets around to approving it) which is even nicer for browsing the absolute BBQ mecca which surrounds us here in Austin.

Let’s Chow Down

I hope you that the data and the apps are useful to you and you eat some fantastic BBQ while in Austin.   It’s worth noting that Franklin, which scores particularly well, just opened their new location at 900 East 11th on Saturday.  It’s a bit of a walk from the Austin Convention Center, but it is worth it.

Please let me know if you have any feedback.

Enjoy!