How To Use Tom’s Food!

Yes, I can hear the spluttering from here. What do you mean, use it?  We read the b****y thing, don't we?

Calm down, dears. What has prompted this is the fairly regular correspondence or chat which I have with people looking for stuff or asking questions which could be easily answered by delving into the melting pot of loveliness which is Tom's Food!

I look back and laugh at the unsophisticated mess that was the early site. Ormidalels.com does not immediately scream food. It was short for Ormidale Licensing Services, the idea which I had for a wee business after I retired. I was having far too much fun being retired, so the idea was shelved. But I did have a website, and an idea for food reviews. I had learned enough from my 13 year old computer whizz mentor to add an extra page, and Tom Eats! was born, followed a few years later by Tom Cooks!

Each of these was, in effect, a single page, every new entry being tacked on to the bottom. More fundamentally there was no search facility. Enter Tom's Food! website Mark 2, designed by web genius Alan Tomkins. To those who are experts, it may not be state of the art, but the bells and whistles continue to please some of you. And that really is the point.

Take the case of the Former Brewing Giant. He and his son planned a jaunt to the races at Aintree. Looking for a place to eat, he reckoned that we would have reviewed a few places in Liverpool, home to youngest daughter. He clicked on Liverpool, then went to Tiger Rock and had a good time. So how do you do this?

Go to the top of the page and click on the Tom Eats! button. You'll then see three search options. The first of these is Location. Click on the arrow and a drop down menu will appear. Beside each town is a number in brackets, showing how many reviews there are for each place. In most places that's a fairly low number, but in Glasgow you can choose from 31, while Edinburgh offers 121. How to narrow it down?

Well the next box is headed Restaurant Types. Same idea of a dropdown menu. You can use the two in tandem. Select both Edinburgh and Indian and you'll get a selection of 9. But there's more. More as in score. That's the third option. There is a bar with two sliding buttons. Personally, I find that a little clunky. Instead you can simply go into the numbers boxes and make a selection. Standards are unbelievably high these days, but remember that a mark of 17.5 equates to 70%, In my day that got you an A pass. You might not want to go for the very top end. Go for a range of, say 19 - 20 in the capital, and 29 fine places await.

Ah, but do they? Caution. Some may have gone forever - within those criteria we have bade farewell to bia bistrot, for example - and others may have changed hands. The other thing to remember is that my reviews are a snapshot, a one off, this is how I found it, this is how I tell it sort of thing. It is the curse of the restaurant reviewer, being asked to recommend a restaurant. I seldom return to places I have reviewed, but sometimes when I have done, I would have given a very different score.

For searches in Tom Cooks! and On The Side, it should, in theory, be simpler. Click on either of these at the top and you'll see a single box on the right hand side, imaginatively entitled Search. This is what they call a free search box. Pop in a word and voilà! Ah, would that it were that simple.

The problem is that the computer will pick up on that word any time it appears. And putting two words in doesn't narrow it down, as you'll get hits for both. With other search engines, you can do clever stuff, which is beyond my pay grade, such as putting things between asterisks. Sadly, I don't think that works either. You will get eleven hits per page. If there are more than that, you'll see a list of numbers at the bottom, which means that more pages are available.

So, just like the blog and its author, the search function isn't perfect but it's a start. I hope you may find something new, something which may inspire you and, I hope, something delicious. Happy cooking.