When you have questions about specific cities you’re traveling to, who better to ask than the people who are actually there?

A lot of apps and services like Nomad for iPad and Trazzler let you ask for travel recommendations, but Uptake helps you ask the people who probably know best.

Uptake is set up to have a web community of people passionate about their local bars, hotels, and restaurants, but the key is that they let you ask questions of your Facebook friends who are local in the city you’re interested in.

Ask a question, get an answer

When you ask questions in an open community, you’re not guaranteed to get an answer. If you’re looking at reviews on Yelp, you don’t really know who are behind them. Your friends are usually the people you trust the most with picking a great bar or pub to eat at, so Uptake takes the extra step of drilling down to the friends who are relevant to your question.

For example, if you want to know which karaoke bars are the best in New York City, connect to Uptake with your Facebook account and simply enter your question and choose a city.

After you click submit, your Facebook friends in that city are shown. You can choose to ask all of them the question in a wall post, or just some of them. The question is also available to other Uptake community members to answer, so that you get a good collection of suggestions.

After you’ve chosen which Facebook friends to ask, a post is placed directly on their wall. It’s actually very well done, and if you don’t ask too many questions in a row, you won’t annoy your friends with the post. They can click on the provided link and provide you with an answer to your question.

It’s really handy, and surely beats creating a list of people using Facebook and blindly messaging them with questions.

How to make local better

Local destinations still need technology, as sites like Yelp have become a stomping ground for trolls sounding off about bad experiences. Social is the key to a good recommendation, but not many services have nailed the experience yet. When I see a recommendation from a name or avatar that I recognize, it instantly has more value to me.

Uptake is in beta right now and promises a few features that aren’t available yet. Things like “Plan your trip” and “Themes and Activities” fit into that category. I’m really interested in seeing the themes feature, because I know that my friends have different tastes and like different aspects of the city that they live in. For example, one of my friends might be a huge museum and history buff, while the other might really be into architecture.

Having just launched publicly today, the community aspect isn’t there yet, but being able to group your friends by location and ask them a question quickly is really something I could see myself using a lot. Other cool travel apps to check out are Gogobot, Trippy, and Fidatto.

➤ Uptake

There are quite a few restaurant and food recommendation apps such as Dinevore, TV Foodmaps, Alfred, and Yelp. And that’s only a few of them.

Chefs Feed aims to change the food recommendation game by bringing you suggestions from actual well-known and respected chefs in your particular city. Right now, Chefs Feed has information and chef recommendations for Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco. The company promises that Seattle, New Orleans, DC, Boston, and Philadelphia are on the way. The app is available for iOS, Android, and Blackberry.

The company isn’t alone with the app, as Virgin America is an official launch partner and is airing a documentary about the Chefs Feed app on its airlines.

Here’s a video from the company, which explains Chefs Feed:

Let the chefs show you the way

Once you sign up and choose your location, the Chefs Feed app grabs your location and gives you the option to look for restaurants and food by Chef or by dish. Since these aren’t your friends and are trained professionals, their recommendations might actually help you make a better decision quicker.

The app for iOS is gorgeous, and everything is tied together beautifully. The food items, restaurants, and chefs are all objects in the system and flowing between them is simple and fast. Once you tap through to a chef, you can read about what restaurant they work at, what foods they recommend and where, and what accolades they’ve received during their career. Chefs Feed has launched with very well-known professionals, some of which have been on the popular TV show “Iron Chef”.

Rating and reviewing

While the chefs are driving the experience on the Chefs Feed app, you can review an item yourself if you’ve already tried it, or add it to try later. Your account stores your list of reviews and plans to try things, so while you’re out and about, the app can lead you to your next restaurant destination.

It’s actually a great experience to let your friends suggest where you go to eat and what you eat once you’re there. I’ve personally experienced some reviews on Yelp though that weren’t helpful, because the person may have been at the restaurant at the wrong time, or was having a bad day. Having trained professional chefs tell you what they think is well cooked, in season, and something that has impressed them, has a very different and important value.

I’d like to see Chefs Feed expand to the cities we mentioned above quickly, and provide an easy way for chefs and restaurants get themselves onto the platform. It doesn’t seem like its site provides an application to do so at this time.

If you’d like a professional to tell you what they suggest for your next meal, then give Chefs Feed a try.