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That is a helpful and well done map in my opinion and I agree with some of the descriptions.  Very down to earth.

That is one that deserves more visibility.   thanks for sharing it.

Rich Boone has maps on his website, dcdiningguide.com (I'm not affiliated with this, but the maps really are quite good.)

If all you need are maps, however (and btw, dcdiningguide.com has a news section that's every bit as valuable as Eater's), an elementary school child could do one, given the data. Witness ....

Speaking of West End, my son and three of his friends went to Roof Terrace last Saturday night (wearing dinner jackets and everything), and waited 30 minutes to get their order taken. :angry: What they didn't realize is that this 18-year-old has more dining experience than the vast majority of people in DC; he's just never been in charge of a table before, and the deferential 18-year-old in him trumped the dining expert in him.

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Rich Boone has maps on his website, dcdiningguide.com (I'm not affiliated with this, but the maps really are quite good.)

If all you need are maps, however (and btw, dcdiningguide.com has a news section that's every bit as valuable as Eater's), an elementary school child could do one, given the data. Witness ....

Speaking of West End, my son and three of his friends went to Roof Terrace last Saturday night (wearing dinner jackets and everything), and waited 30 minutes to get their order taken. :angry: What they didn't realize is that this 18-year-old has more dining experience than the vast majority of people in DC; he's just never been in charge of a table before, and the deferential 18-year-old in him trumped the dining expert in him.

Simple maps are easy to create.  I do them.  I like richer maps.  The one referenced in the opening thread is richer, somewhat.  It includes a brief review of the referenced restaurants.  I scanned some of them;  agreed with and enjoyed them, along with valuing the information.  They were to the point and readable, if geared toward a certain audience and perspective, IMHO.

Then a second point.  Getting good and helpful maps, visibility.  Rich Boone's maps are also very good.  Click on a point of interest and it gives the restaurant name and contact information.  I clicked on some of the restaurants in the NYC guide and it gave even richer more robust information.   Rich's site, DCdiningguide.com gives dr.com a lot of visibility and mention.   That is if people get there and use it.

Creating richer, more robust maps is the more difficult and time consuming part.  Unless you are auto scraping types of data into each item in a map its a time consuming process.

The second difficult element is getting the maps visibility and usage.  That is a marketing issue.  Its difficult.   There is a lot of competition.  Right now if I want a map of restaurants in an area, or a location I'm visiting I'd use yelp.  Its very rich with information.  Look up a city and/or a neighborhood and there are a ton of restaurants.  Click on any one of them and you get a full yelp page on that restaurant.  Its both a directory with tons of information and photos and its that review site.  The directory itself is as thorough and comprehensive as any around.  From a search and information basis its a very usable site.

Look up restaurants in an area.  Yelp will give you 10 to a page with a map of the 10.  Click on any one restaurant and you get a page with tremendous detail, including hours, often a link to the menu, contact information, reservation information, a tremendous variety of data on amenities, etc.   Really highly usable and informative IMHO.  Very thorough.  It often includes helpful photos including those from the restaurant and those from reviewers.

There are a million reasons to hate yelp.  But as a directory with information and usually updated information its quite good imho and better with more useful information than most other directories available on the web.  They are also pretty good at updating information in a timely way.  From my experience Yelp and Google are probably the two best directories at updating information on a reasonably timely basis.   They aren't perfect but in an environment (US) with roughly 1 million restaurants, they are quite good.

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I don't have any of the DC area, but I keep google maps of most of the places I visit, and update them when I see articles about new places.  So if you ever want a map of another location, I may have one.  I thought I remember someone posting a few at one point on Chowhound, but it would have been a while ago if I remember it.  

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