// Pocket Picks //

You’re out and about in town, you’re feeling peckish, and you know it’s A Bad Idea to go to KFC for the third time this week. So what do you do?

You could stumble into a random restaurant and risk culinary catastrophe. Or you could fire up your mobile phone to read some reviews of local eateries.

Obviously, I’d recommend the second option. And to show you how to do it, I’ve been playing with The Mobile Food Guide, a WAP site that promises “the world’s best restaurants in the palm of your hand.”

Step 1: Load the site
Go to your mobile phone’s WAP browser, and enter the address http://www.themobilefoodguide.com/mobile to go to the site. It loads up, although on the Nokia N70 I used, the front page didn’t quite fit onto the mobile screen. This doesn’t affect using the site, thankfully.

Step 2: Browse by country
You can use the site’s search facility to look for a specific restaurant – useful if you’re standing outside it – or you can drill down by country. The latter option gives you a choice of the UK, US, Australia, Ireland or France. For the purposes of this guide, I went for the UK and pressed Next.

Step 3: Specify where you want to eat
The next screen asks you to choose a Region within that country.. I went for London, before being prompted to choose the County (Central London) and then the specific place (Covent Garden). The next page you see is a long list of possible restaurants to nosh in.

Step 4: Pick a restaurant
Pick a likely-sounding restaurant by clicking on its name. The site brings up a page with information on its address, telephone number, type of cuisine, opening times and acceptable payment methods. It even tells you the chef’s name! On some phones, there’s an option to directly dial the restaurant from this page to make a booking or enquiry.

Step 5: Read a review
The Mobile Food Guide has reviews of the restaurants, which you access by clicking on the ‘Mobile Food Guide report’ link from their pages. You can read an expert’s view, then go back to the restaurant’s page if you want to book, or look at more restaurants in the same area if it doesn’t sound suitable.

Step 6: The alternatives
The Mobile Food Guide isn’t the only, well, mobile food guide available. Website Toptable has a WAP version, while magazine Time Out offers a downloadable mobile application which includes restaurant and bar reviews – but only for London.