Website offers quick access to Ann Arbor restaurants

Students no longer need to wade, sometimes late at night, through dozens of glossy menus from area restaurants shoved under their doors to find a suitable place to eat.

New entrepreneurs, LSA junior Adam Feldheim and Business junior Evan Frank, launched their Website, AnnArborMenu.com, www.annarbormenu.com, on Aug. 15 after a summer spent designing pages and signing restaurants up for the service.

AnnArborMenu.com is the latest in a trend of Web menu sources available to students.

The mission of the site, Frank said, is provide a "comprehensive restaurant index" for Ann Arbor.

The site lists about 200 restaurants, sorted alphabetically or by genre - from Middle Eastern to coney, Thai to pizza - in addition to a host of other information. Phone numbers, addresses and directions are available for the majority of the restaurants listed, and menus for roughly half.

Additionally, the site denotes which credit cards the restaurants accept, which restaurants deliver and which are located on campus.

But the service could face stiff competition.

National competitor Food.com cites college students as their largest and fastest growing audience, said corporate Director of Communications David Gilcreast.

Food.com plans, in the next 60 days, to roll out a major initiative to attract college students on 65 campuses nationwide, he said. Food.com currently lists about 15,000 restaurants across the country, including menus for all and instructions for placing orders online.

Frank said AnnArborMenu.com may appeal to students because the information it contains is specific to the Ann Arbor area.

The company also advertises actively in Ann Arbor using air banners at Michigan football games and promotional t-shirts, he said, which aims to benefit the restaurants advertised on AnnArborMenu.com.

"Students don't know about Food.com, they don't advertise here," Frank said.

But, Food.com already has 150 posters on campus and is scheduled to begin placing inserts in campus publications in the next couple of weeks, said Diana Nafissi, University Program Manager for Food.com.

Restaurateurs are undecided on the fusion of food and the net.

"I told them, I'll try it for three months, and we'll see how it works," said A Taste of Italy owner Tom Sinawe, who advertises his State Street restaurant on AnnArborMenu.com. Sinawe said he has had a few students come in and order with menus printed off the Internet.

But Good Time Charley's, an advertiser on both Websites hasn't "seen any results from it yet," said daytime manager Ben Ballweg.

Many of the site's advertisers said they have a difficult time gauging the number of students using the service.

Whether students will use the sites or stick with traditional methods of locating menus remains unclear.

"It sounds like it would be convenient to be able to get menus and other information about restaurants online, and if that is the case, this is definitely something I think students would use," LSA first-year student Jeff Hamuth said.

09-15-99