Top 10 iPhone Apps for Foodies

From eating out to cooking at home, foodies have it made thanks to the large number of delicious iPhone apps available to help them find, order, and make tasty meals.  From locating the hottest new restaurants to reserving a seat at a local favorite, from tracking down farm fresh produce to cooking a five-course meal, the following selection of foodie-centric iPhone apps will make your life positively scrumptious. 

1. Urbanspoon

Urbanspoon is one of the best restaurant finders on the iPhone, allowing you to search and browse by neighborhood, cuisine, and price (or a combination of the three).  One of the best features of Urbanspoon is the "slot machine," which lets you shake your phone for a random dining recommendation (though you can lock in a specific area, type of food, or price range).  The app offers both user and critic reviews for each restaurant, and for iPhone 3G S owners, the newest version of Urbanspoon augments reality with a camera overlay view showing the nearest eateries.
 
Price: FREE
 
2. MenuPages
 
Sometimes, just finding the name of a restaurant isn't enough -- you need to know what you can actually order there before you can decide if that's the place to sate your hunger.  The MenuPages app allows you to do just that by pulling up full menus for a large number of restaurants in New York City, San Francisco, Philadelphia, South Florida, Washington DC, Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago.    
 
Price: FREE
 
3. Zagat To Go
 
This app may be a bit on the pricey side, but the name Zagat has been synonymous with restaurant reviews for over 30 years, and now their expertise is at your fingertips in the form of a very solid iPhone app.  Their app offers reviews from over 45 different city restaurant guide books, advanced filtering options, location based search, and -- like Urbanspoon -- an augmented reality feature allowing you to see nearby restaurants through your phone's camera.  One of the best features of Zagat, though, is the offline sync, which lets users search and view restaurant ratings even when their Internet connection is spotty.
 
Price: $9.99
 
4. OpenTable
 
Okay, you've figured out where you want to eat, now how do you make sure you can actually get a table when you get there?  The OpenTable app has you covered by allowing you to make reservations (for free) at any of over 11,000 OpenTable-enabled restaurants in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom.  Zagat To Go also offers reservation capabilities, powered by OpenTable, so if you already have Zagat (and don't care to dine at non-Zagat rated eateries), then this app might be redundant.
 
Price: FREE
 
5. Foursquare
 
While it remains to be seen which app will ultimately prevail in the location-based app wars, Foursquare is the decided favorite right now.  For foodies, Foursquare is a great way to tune into the local hot spots by monitoring checkins and seeing what your friends are up to.  And by following along with what people say when they check into various locales, you can pick up great tips from those in the know (like, "Try the jalepeño burger!").
 
Price: FREE
 
6. Food Truck
 
Foodies in cities around the country are starting to recognize that sometimes great food comes on wheels.  And thanks to Twitter and other location-based social media sites, finding gourmet food trucks has never been easier.  The Food Truck app for the iPhone lets hungry city dwellers find rolling eats in their vicinity in 8 different U.S. cities.  Also check out FoodTrucker, a similar app (that's actually free right now) with a slightly different list of covered cities.
 
Price: $0.99
 
7. Locavore
 
One of the hottest trends among foodies right now is the slow food, or local food movement.  Finding fresh, local, farm-to-table ingredients has never been easier thanks to a growing network of farmers' markets.  Locavore is a great app that not only connects you to your local market, but lets you know what types of foods should be in season in your area -- which is invaluable for menu planning before you go down to the market.  Also check out iFarmMarket ($0.99), which lists over 4,600 farmers' markets across the United States.
 
Price: $2.99
 
8. Harvest
 
Do you know how to tell if an artichoke is ripe?  How about the best way to keep asparagus fresh?  I don't either, but the Harvest iPhone app can tell you.  The app has handy tips and tricks for selecting and then keeping nice and edible 126 different varieties of fruits and vegetables.  You'll never be stuck with rotten produce again.
 
Price: $2.99
 
9. Epicurious Recipes & Shopping List
 
Epicurious brings together recipes from two of the most popular and well-respected foodie magazines to ever grace newsstands: Bon Appétit and the now defunct Gourmet.  Their free iPhone app gives home chefs access to their library of over 27,000 recipes from the test kitchens and archives of these giants of culinary publishing.  The app also features an auto-generated shopping list and a step-by-step mode that makes it easy to page through recipes while cooking
 
Price: FREE
 
10. Big Oven
 
If you somehow manage to work through the 27,000 recipes in the Epicurious app (or have a hankering for a variation their app doesn't offer) then Big Oven will almost certainly fill the void.  The free app puts over 170,000 recipes at your fingertips.  One of the coolest features of the app is the Leftover Wizard, which allows you to input what's in your fridge and get a list of potential recipes that you could make to put that leftover food back to work in new (and hopefully tasty) ways.
 
Price: FREE


Do you have a favorite food app? Tell us more about it in the comments.

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