NBC Launches Feast, a Food Blog and Meta Data Site

Today, we'd like to welcome to the dance floor Feast, the new food site from NBC. Feast has two main components— a restaurant news and video blog in the Eater/Grub Street/Fork in the Road/The Feed vein and a meta critic platform. The first part is straightforward; the second is where the bells and whistles come in. Kind of like a Rotten Tomatoes for the food world, the site's algorithm takes in reviews from all over the web—from the Times reviews to blogger buzz—and spits out a number, ranking every restaurant in the city anywhere from Dicey to Epic. Rankings change daily based on new reviews or buzz, and the heavy hitters like Sifton and Platt have a greater ability to move the needle than the little guys.

The site is still in beta, so there are some glitches—Frankies 457 is is rated 54 while a duplicate listing gets a 45, and the page for Frankie and Johnnie's (a 72) features quotes about Frankies 17 (a 46). But in all it's a fun and addictive site to play around with—especially for restaurant obsessives and numbers geeks—and it could prove to be a useful tool for figuring out where to eat.
· Feast [Official Site]