It Just Might Work: The ‘Salt’ app

My dream app is finally here.

Salt, a free app, lets you put in your favorite bars and restaurants, adding details about your experience there. That’s not the good part. What’s brilliant about Salt is that it allows you to search items added by friends or accounts like Eater in myriad ways — maybe you want something cheap and open late in your neighborhood, or you’re wondering where to eat Japanese food on your upcoming trip to Asheville, or you’re curious if there are any good new places to drink when you go home to visit family.

Users can add places whether they’ve been or not, saving a location for future reference. In other words, you can actually keep track of places you’d like to check out, and have them geographically oriented on a map. That means you can pull it up and see what’s nearby, look at what specific people recommend, and more.

I always knew I needed something like Salt, but in its absence, I imagined creating a gigantic flow chart to do its job to list my recommendations for where to eat locally. But I’m generally at a loss when I go to a new city, perusing lists in the local alt-weeklies, checking Eater and occasionally putting out a generalized Facebook call. Salt is an amalgam of all the above, making it easier to browse, search and find really great places you’d like to go (or just remember where you ate last year on that weekend getaway to New York or the Outer Banks).

The problem with Salt is that it’s still pretty young — I only have one friend on there, unless you count someone I convinced to join but who hasn’t added any suggestions of her own. I follow some bigger influencer accounts, but for it to really be helpful, I need y’all to join.