This week, we explored the food tour app concept in more detail and decided to rework our concept so that it focuses more on the cultural aspect of food in New York City.

Old Concept

Our initial project concept had a few aspects to it: present-day food maps, historical food maps, and food tours. Based on the class feedback, we zeroed in on the food tour aspect and were planning on generating customizable food tours for NYC.

Problems Encountered

Long story short, there are a lot of food tour apps out there, and there is no clear way for us to add anything new to the food tour app sphere. Some notable examples include:

  1. Rama: Offers pre-written, “curated” food tours and crawls by food fanatics for a low price of $1-3 each tour.
  2. Peek: Offers scheduled tours (e.g. Pizza and Little Italy Walks, Neighborhood Wine Tours, etc.) for a price, as well as booking services for the destinations in your itinerary.
  3. Localeur: Offers crowd-sourced food collections (e.g. Best Donuts in Boston, Best Places to Brunch, etc.) subject to community up-votes and down-votes.
  4. Many, many more…

New Concept

We’ve decided to pivot and focus more on the cultural/academic aspect of our original idea. We are planning on building a data visualization tool that allows viewers to visualize different ethnic cuisines in NYC with overlaid auxiliary information. The auxiliary information we include is subject to the data we can find, but so far we plan on displaying information regarding:

  1. Restaurant accolades
  2. Ethnic neighborhood break down
  3. Fusion level
    This tool will be geared more towards academics such as food anthropologists, so it will be optimized for desktop browsers.

Next Steps

Borrowing from the process of the VRMFA team, we decided to split the work into front-end (Nicole) and back-end (Zygi) and focus on building bare minimum functionality: heat maps that show the distribution of different ethnic cuisines in NYC. After this, we will tackle additional dimensions to overlay on our heat maps.