BookofCooks – Useless, Awful, Frustrating.
Bookofcooks.com is just another one of those cool finds on the internet that we’re reviewing here on Crenk lately. These ‘finds’ of ours are useful and insightful – serving a purpose to some if not all people. For example, seathound.com was reviewed here yesterday. That had a bigger market than bookofcooks.com which is, in comparison, rather limited.
I logged in and put my critic hat on. But then I took it off because this was just too easy to review. It serves a purpose. A small one that might come in handy if the yellow pages have spontaneously combusted and every restaurant within a 12 mile radius of your house has “Closed for Renovation”. Basically, if you’re in need of a cook for an event or just want a simple birthday cake whipped up you type in your location. Simple right?
So for example, New York. From this I got … sweet nothing. That stupid map just kept flickering around showing me smiling people in Orlando wearing chef costumes. After a while, I got the thing to work having signed out then back in and was greeted by an indistinguishable list of cooks, caterers and chefs. I was like ‘what use is this?’
I could have swam to Shetland Island near Scotland, found a cook from the rural population, and swam home again with a roasted wild boar on my back by the time bookofcooks.com would have found me a chef called ‘Sandy’ in Orlando. Except, wait, I wanted a chef in NEW YORK!
If you’re a cook, I wouldn’t bother advertising your services here. Just stick to the local flyers or a simple website. You could spend an hour of your time setting up a profile, uploading pics and references only to have someone 200 miles away ask you to cook for them.
I truly wish I had something good to say about this. It’s not like I enjoy slating websites. This could have been good had they developed it right but its just to time consuming, complicated and troublesome to ever be used in an emergency.
Really and truly, this is utterly useless. If you want a chef in your area and the yellow pages has turned to ash, every food business is now populated by shirtless men lifting RSJs and every cook book in the land doesn’t have the right dish…use Google. 3/10
1 Comment
Hi Dean,
I was just reading your review of Book of Cooks. I am sorry that you didn’t have great experience trying to use our site. I empathize with most of what you wrote. Searching for a certain cuisine-specialty and not getting enough hits…being shown irrelevant results from a city that you are not interested in – it’s frustrating. We are working on fine tuning the search feature and few other things across the site (also adding some cool new features). Trying our best with very limited resources. As far as the site not having a great deal of content, we are hoping that that’ll change as the site continues to increase in usership, and those new users flesh out their profiles (please keep in mind that the site is relatively new – launched in mid June). Again, I am sorry that you had such an awful experience. I know that with your review you were just trying to set high standards. Thanks for keeping us on our toes!
Julian
Co-Founder
Book Of Cooks