If you live in Louisville, KY, there’s a new, pending, iPhone app that you may want to check out. Menu and Hours strives to bring Louisville natives the menu and hours of many local restaurants. Why is this app innovative when you can just conduct a Google search for the menu and hours of many local restaurants? Well, Menu and Hours developers, Michelle Jones, has promised those who pledge to support the app (more on this in a bit) a complete food app that doesn’t include site that don’t work on your iPhone or complex PDF menus that you have to download.

Instead, what you’ll get is an app that simply provides you with the menu and hours of a local restaurant (in addition to some other information). If this sound like a good idea to you, Michelle is asking the general public to pledge money to the app’s cause, so that she can hire a great design team to complete the app (as you may know, building an iPhone app is an expensive endeavor!). Menu and Hours sounds like a great app that will be interesting to see if full action, though there is just one thing that seems to be in the way of this app really taking off.

A Problem

It’s hard to speak for Menu and Hours right away (since the app isn’t technically working right now), but other food apps that have attempted to provide users with information of this sort are lacking in one department. The area where most of these apps lack is the detailed information area. Sure, a developer can get lots of menu information from a few restaurants, but most of these restaurants are chains or larger places that a true foodie won’t want to attend. Otherwise, smaller restaurants don’t have websites or information of this sort available online (this is where Menu and Hours might succeed, if the developer can gather all of this information and insert it into an app.


The other problem (two problems then, I suppose) is that apps like this one tend to be focused on one specific area. Menu and Hours states from the start that the app aims to provide people from Louisville with information, but I’m guessing that people who live in other cities would like an app of this sort as well, but how would that task be accomplished?

There are simply too many restaurants and not enough people available to gather information. Sure, the “user added information” model has been tried with some other existing apps, but this always seems to fail due to the general laziness of users. Possible problems aside, Menu with Hours does serve a good and basic purpose that many people may find very useful.

A Good Idea

How often have you looked for the hours or for a menu of a restaurant? If you’re like most smartphone Googlers, you’ve probably spent too long searching for basic restaurant details (and, most of the time, these details can’t be found). Menu and Hours aims to change all of that wasted search time. Instead of spending too long looking for information that should be basic and simple, Menu with Hours will make life easier by providing you with menu and hour details in a snap. If you love this idea, and you live in Louisville, make sure to support this app by heading to http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michellej/menu-and-hours-an-iphone-app/ and donating.