Just launched: Foodster helps you find the most loved food on Foursquare

Remember BonApp, the delicious Foursquare hack that suggests dishes to you when you check-in at restaurants?

Well, the intelligent foodies behind BonApp have just launched Foodster, a web app*, which displays a ranking of restaurants in descending order of popularity on a map. The popularity is decided by the number of foods that have been mentioned in a positive way on Foursquare tips.

“The fantastic thing about this approach is ranking a restaurant based on how people rate individual dishes,” says co-creator Namit Chadha, who worked on the app with the AppSpark team. “We’re using our powerful information extraction engine from BonApp to power the service.”

Foodster is fully built on Foursquare’s API and powered by recommendations from Foursquare tips. Foodster currently covers over 5,000 venues in NYC alone, and another 2,000 in San Francisco with over 50,000 food or drink recommendations in total. Chadha says London and a few more US cities soon.

Foodster is a sweet and simple Foursquare hack. As you can see from the app above, the design is pretty minimalist. Restaurants are ranked on the left, the map is on the right, and when you click on a particular restaurant, it pulls up all the popular menu items and Foursquare tips for each menu item in the center column. If you go to Ippudo, first invite me and then order the Akamaru Modern, 18 tips don’t lie.

I just wish it had a few more features, which are: the ability to add tips I see on the web app to my Foursquare account and an integration with Tapl.io to solve the rest of my problems.

*Today, [September 22, 2011] the Foodster iPhone app hit the AppStore & is available in the US & UK with 4 cities currently supported: New York, San Francisco, Austin & London. It supports over 5,000 venues in NYC alone & another 2,000 in SF like getfoodster.com on the web.

Other Foursquare hacks you’ll enjoy: A sweet Foursquare hack lets you know where you checked-in one year ago each day [here] and Use Foursquare to track local transit times [here].

Featured image: Shutterstock/Luiz Rocha