Who are we? How does a discussion forum help you and me find amazing food?

Who are we? How does a discussion forum help you and me find amazing food?

We are a bunch of knowledgeable food lovers who love to dine out as well as cook up a storm when we are at home! We are curious about all cuisines and love to discover under-the-radar holes-in-the-walls and also enjoy eating at the temples!

Why not just read an article or blog post, you may ask? We do that too. But we love to calibrate others’ assessment of an eatery/ dish/ cuisine against our own experience via discussions so we can find food that matches our preferences well. It’s not infrequent that one finds a good review of a restaurant, tries it and is disappointed because it doesn’t please their palate-- everyone’s taste is different! Just because famous critic A likes it doesn’t mean you will. A discussion forum allows you to find folks with similar tastes and share experiences.

A discussion forum is also a great place to pool our collective knowledge of various neighborhood and world cuisines. Because of our diverse backgrounds, we all know about cuisines we often ate growing up or eat a lot now, interesting culinary history or tidbits, but we realize that we also don’t know about a lot of other cultures and their cuisines. So a discussion forum enables this exchange of knowledge, and through this exchange, we all learn from each other.

Why not a point or rating system like Yelp then? Because one person’s 5 star is another person’s 1 star. The result? Every eatery has between 3 and 4 stars…

Happy eating and discussing here on Hungry Onion!


ETA:

If you like what you see so far, you can help Hungry Onion get to the critical mass needed for lively back-and-forth discussions we all love by:

  • Start a thread (or a few!) about a topic you are excited about- restaurant you visited where you live or on your trips, cooking techniques, wine, whatever you are passionate about!
  • Share the site/ threads on social media- ex-CH groups, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. People may retweet etc.
  • Spread the word! Email your friends about the site. Let your friends know on social networks.
  • Write to your local food writers/ journalists/ bloggers.

What Hungry Onion is:

  • User friendly
    A site that is easy to use and uncluttered so it lets participants to share their thoughts very easily and encourages free-flowing in-depth discussion. In addition, it will also be user-friendly in the sense that it will be sensitive to the needs of the users.

  • Not-for-profit.
    For-profit companies put the interest of shareholders (profits) first since the shareholders are the owners. The model is geared towards reaching out to a bigger audience and maximizing ad and partner revenue. Eventually, the model over-commercializes the forum content and alienates the core user base. This site will put the interest of the users first.

  • A knowledge depository for the knowledge contributors, not in a corporate setting
    When companies need to maximize profit and reach, they may change the UI, dumb down the site, or do something that makes the access to the knowledge base much more difficult than before. Users may have little say in decisions. On top of that, the knowledge is owned by the companies (even though its contributed by everyone!).
    The knowledge on this site will remain out of corporations. I expect that if the site gets enough traction, the core group of users will be highly knowledgeable and passionate about food. I am trying to bring control of the knowledge base back to the knowledge contributors with this site so that down the road, there is less risk to the collective accumulated knowledge.

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I have read …

The only question I have is regarding uploading photographs to match a thread …

Thank you.

Either drag the photos and drop them into this text box or upload your photos to an image hosting site and then copy-paste urls.

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Presunto,

Thank you for the photo instruction options.

Instructions here:

Other tips can be found here:

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Please bear in mind that by default, the forum software will automatically download the images from the external sites to the server of HO.

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Thank you very much Naf.

I shall give it a try tomorrow …

Testing successful.

Thank you.

Photo: Alexandria @ Le Mercat de La Boquerià - Barcelona.

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