Ask HN: Is this an American restaurant? –. and other questions | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is this an American restaurant? –. and other questions

7 pointsbeardyw12 comments

I was looking up the opening times for a little cabin in a local park here in the UK which sells coffee and a few items of food to take away. I accidentally ended up on Trip Advisor which asked me "Is this an American restaurant?".

These sorts of questions seem to be a thing on some websites and on google but I never really understood what it is about. I hope some folks here might enlighten me - namely:

1. What motivates this from a business perspective - does this activity have a name? 2. Are these questions asked by site visitors? 3. Since I am local do they guess I might know? 4. If I ask "Can I buy a lawnmower here" will someone get asked that? 5. Is the data collected useful?

As to what qualifies something as an American restaurant I have no idea.

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I think that's still 'crowdsourcing'.

They might ask for new information or that you validate an existing user contribution. It helps them a lot, you do free work. Be it Yelp, TripAdvisor or similar database that collect POI data (points of interest) or similar addresses, that's big business. There's only a few global databases like that in the world and they all have to kept up-to-date to compete with Google Maps. I say Google Maps because that's where most business owners add their own data immediately (and for free) while the same business owner won't update their profile in the other databases.

Foursquare charges $5 USD per 1000 API requests (https://foursquare.com/products/pricing/), Google $17.

As for the cuisine I can only point to the definitions OpenStreetMap uses https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:cuisine#Cuisine_(eth....) and what mappers really added to places around the world https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/cuisine#values

Thanks for the explanation.

I've found Google Map's food search oddly dysfunctional, without a way to search for category-independent any Food&Drink. What am I missing?

Abstract UX conversation: Q:"What are my nearby food options?" A:"Restaurants, Groceries, Coffee, Desert, or Bars?" (those are subcategories under Food&Drink). Q:"Yes, any of those. Please also include bakeries. And (especially in ethnic areas) convenience stores." A:"Which?" (but you can't search for Food&Drink). Q:"Any Food!" A:"Which?" Q:"Sigh". I've been "Wait, isn't there that nice cafe around here somewhere... I'm not seeing it under Restaurants... nor Coffee... nor a typed search for "cafe"... nor "food"... arg, ok, "bakery" finds it. Sigh.". So exploring food options requires manually integrating multiple searches. I'm puzzled.

> As to what qualifies something as an American restaurant I have no idea.

Doesn't matter, but you and 19 other people will be asked that, and if the general consensus is yes, the tag 'American Food' will be added to the restaurant, and you've just been crowdsourced.

Isn't "American food" burgers and fried things? Just like every other $country-an food is a few stereotypical dishes bowdlerized for the local palate.

In general, American food includes more than burgers and fried things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cuisine

That's definitely one face of American food. Other countries, even smallish ones, have more than one definition of what qualifies as "their food". There isn't one kind of Italian food or Indian food. America is huge and has a lot of distinct regional cuisines as well as a dense cultural makeup. Even discounting "Americanized" foods like Chinese food, I can think of a few different types of restaurants I'd call "American".

That's pretty much what I said, though? I don't know what you're actually disagreeing with? "American food" in the UK is going to be a few stereotypical (in UK context) American dishes adapted for local consumption.

I guess when I said there's a lot more to it than burgers and fried food, I was disagreeing with the part where you said "Isn't "American food" burgers and fried things?".

It's also things like Maine lobster, steamers and mussels. It's also pizza. It's also Jambalaya and Gumbo. It's also peanut butter and jelly. It's Philly Cheesesteaks and Cobb Salads and lots of different kinds of barbecue.

These are regional, but Italian food has regions too. Northern and Southern Italian cuisines are different, and both types of restaurants are just as much Italian.

Every "American" restaruant I have been to generally consists of the following: chicken wings, at least 4 hamburgers, a chicken and a fish sandwich, a club sandwich, at least 4 salads one of which will always be a Caesar and one of which is likely to be a Cobb or Wedge salad, a couple noodle dishes one of which will be chicken alfredo, and then a steak plate and a fish plate that both look nice but are generally too expensive to justify getting.

Sometimes they will also include pizzas and some sort of crab artichoke dip.

Two uses of the same term. It does describe food commonly served in that genre of restaurant, but also describes the American (or whatever other country's) food canon. Neither use limits the other.

If I understand your question correctly, the search term that will bring the answers you seek is "labeled data" [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labeled_data

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