Picturing your next meal just got easier

Ever had a steak so mouth-watering you wanted to take a picture? Go ahead. Londoners are increasingly adding their photos to a culinary map of the capital, through a new geolocation guide for today's foodies.

Foodspotting is a website and iPhone app that lets you share images of the food you've had. Whether it's pie or profiteroles, you can post a "sighting" of a good meal by snapping a picture, uploading it and tagging it with your location.

You gain "tips" for each dish you upload or if people click to "want" the food you've added. If that chilli burrito is the best you've ever had, you can award it a prestigious blue ribbon to point that out to the world.

The ethos behind Foodspotting is that food fans on the move don't care about ambient music, silky drapes or polite waiters; it's all about the grub that's placed in front of you.

Foodspotting's iPhone app has just passed the milestone of 400,000 downloads worldwide. "Our users are mainly US-based but we're growing rapidly," says Foodspotting's head of social media, Amy Cao. "We're ramping up our presence in the UK."

Foodspotting has 1,750 London dishes and counting, and the site is approaching notable food bloggers and getting the capital's restaurants to encourage customers to add sightings.

Foodspotting co-founder Alexa Andrzejewski is based in San Francisco and was behind last year's redesign of the website MySpace. After visiting South Korea, she returned home with a craving to try more of the foods she'd sampled but realised there was no easy way to search for the best of a specific food.

"When you're out and about you want to make fast decisions, not think about what three versus four stars means," says Andrzejewski. "There are some restaurants with only two-star ratings on review sites that do one dish amazingly," she says. "Foodspotting lets that restaurant stand out for what it does well."

Matt Gierhart works at marketing agency OgilvyAction in Paddington and uses Foodspotting to "peek past the menu" before trying a restaurant: "I love London but I've had some devastatingly bad meals when I've just guessed in the high street. Breakfast at the Wet Fish Café in West Hampstead was the best I've spotted recently."

Browsing the London map just after dinner time, I spot delicate ahi tuna at Ukai Sushi on Westbourne Grove, Thai-style tacos at Patara on Greek Street, and hearty pork scratchings at the Old Nun's Head in Peckham. Better get spotting.

foodspotting.com