Lunch Time? Check out “Makan Di Mana” Before You Go

One application that will help you to choose a lunch spot is Makan Di Mana (Where to Eat) developed by PT Agranet Multicitra Siberkom, the owner of the famous news portal Detik.com. Available for iOS platform (iPhone) and Android, this free application offers a list of restaurants / places to dine in almost all over Indonesia. Indeed, most information is still in around Jakarta and major cities in Java, but if you check the list in other cities there are also already listed, for example in Banda Aceh or in Ambon.

There are five main features in this application, which are Promo, Nearest, Area & Category, Ask @ Bondan and Recommendations. From the five menus, the Nearest feature is the most useful for me right now.

During the trial of this application, by taking your current location information, the app will provide recommendations of various restaurants within a radius of 2 km. If you click further, you will be given a second relevant information about the venue, such as complete addresses and phone numbers. Unfortunately, the available menu tab is still not always contain what foods are provided at the venue concerned.

For Promo, this will also be interesting if a lot of Promo information already provided based on the nearest location. This promo, in addition to lists of credit card information, will be more interesting if it cooperates with daily deals site that already exist, so it will more easily to take advantage of promo coupons because no need to bother making their own daily deals application. I wait if there are related daily deals sites who would take this good opportunity.

Area & Category features contains a complete restaurant informations. This is very useful if you are looking for a venue based on the type of food or are looking for a restaurant when traveling out of town. Surely, the list of foods that exist in this application is far more than sites that have similar information available, although not from a user generated contents.

Two additional features of this application is the recommendation and Tanya @ Bondan. The first is a set of recommendations based on the writings that have been published in DetikFood as a food information channel of Detik.com. The second of course already familiar to you, Bondan Winarno as an advisor in DetikFood (also founder of the Makansutra community) also participated in this application. Unfortunately this feature is in the form of a question to his Twitter account and will mixed up with his other tweets. In my opinion, Mr. Bondan as a culinary icon, should be given his own communication channel that is dedicated to answering all sorts of questions that come through this application.

There are some redundancy I found in the list of restaurants in this application. The number of restaurants in many cities listed twice. But I think it's something minor and can be quickly corrected in later versions of the next renewal. It is also expected to develop in the future, the platform supported is not only the iOS and Android, but also BlackBerry or Symbian to expand the user market.

So it's almost lunch hour right now, time to check this application on your iPhone and determine the most appropriate food to satisfy your culinary desires today!

Translated by Nita Sellya.