The San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau wants you to have the greatest dining experience possible on you next trip to the Bay Area. They've added Taste as an additional website to the official visitors bureau site, and it's completely dedicated to food.

I was particularly interested in Taste, as I am going to San Francisco later this summer and I want any dining info I can get. Taste does offer plenty of dining information, especially of you have plenty of cash to spend on your trip. There's a mini blog, Foodie 411, and a calender of upcoming food events. Also, you can check out restaurants based on different categories like 'price', 'dining adventures', and 'al fresco', even the area of town. Overall the site is interesting and east to navigate.

There is one area that I think Taste is deficient in. Taste has a section dedicated to drinks, and it is awful. There is only one brew pub listed and no wine bars, even though they have several wineries listed. I'm not sure what's going on with that, but my guess is that the brew pubs didn't sign up with the visitor's bureau. Either way, if you're planning on going to San Francisco this website can help with dining choices, but definitely use as many resources as possible for the food aspect of your trip to San Francisco.

Whether you grow it, sell it or drink it, coffee is now more than just a hobby or your favorite drink - it's also your ticket to new friends, new information and a serious gateway to procrastination.

I'm referring to Barista Exchange and Barista Connection, two new additions to the sorta-recent explosion of social networking sites. But unlike Facebook and MySpace, these two cater to a specific audience, and the content revolves around everything java.

On Barista Exchange, you create a profile (first, define yourself by any number of coffee-related personas, including a barista, a farmer, or simply an enthusiast), and then gain access to thousands of similar-minded peeps. The name of the site describes one of its primary features: members can use their connections to facilitate an actual coffee exchange, which consists of baristas changing places for a week or so to experience the coffee culture in each others' city.

Snooth.com will flock to your rescue.

Log onto the site and access over two million reviews from both professional wine critics and average wine lovers to choose the perfect accent to tonight's dinner.

You have to sign up to be a member if you want to write your own, but anyone can search for reviews. The simple interface makes it hard to screw up - just type in your search term and you're immediately inundated with dozens of potential choices.

Not sure what to search for? Snooth suggests using terms like "Cab Sauv," "good with pork," or "spice," and if the responses are too overwhelming, you can further narrow your results by price, year, type, region, or varietal.

...But don't blame us if you walk away more indecisive than when you started.

I am in heaven. First I find flame decals for my Kitchen Aid. Now I've found the best web site ever, at least in my opinion.

Pastry Chef Central has everything a pastry chef (or geek) could ever want!
The site is basically split up into two sections: tools and ingredients. The tools section has several categories each filled with wonderful, beautiful toys, I mean tools. The ingredients section doesn't have any sub-sections, but it doesn't need any as it's choc full of lovely and fantastic things necessary for all manner of delicious desserts.

There's a third section, actually. It's a resource area with recipes and an "Ask the Chef" link.

The site is great. It's easy to read and follow. It's neat and clean, as any pastry web site should be. Best of all, Pastry Chef Central has lots of pictures! Can you actually see me drooling? Does anyone have any other pastry/baking websites to share?

If you are female and often browse the internet to find various items of interest, this may be a good site for you to check out. Much like Digg, Netscape, and the like, Sk*rt features reader-submitted articles, webpages, blogs, videos, etc. which you can vote for if you enjoyed it. The main difference with Sk*rt is that it was designed by women and is very female-centric, focusing on categories such as food, fashion, mind/body/spirit, arts & crafts, parenting, and more. Of course our focus here is their food section, naturally, but the rest looks pretty interesting too.

Best part is - you can use this site for your own purposes. If you are simply looking for some interesting ideas, you can browse what others have submitted. If you are looking to share info or increase traffic on your own blog or website, you are able to submit your own links.

Besides, when it helps us to find such items as chocolate bubble-wrap, it just can't be a bad thing.

Even before Chowhound became a part of the Chow network, users frequently had problems with deletions. Controversial posts and less than glowing reviews of certain restaurants were deleted without explanation and some users found that their posts were deleted with a high frequency, regardless of the topic. Since the message board is a public forum, it is perfectly appropriate for moderators to remove offensive content, but when non-offensive reviews of "off the table restaurants" and other posts relevant to the website were taken down without explanation, many users grew frustrated. The problems persist with the new Chowhound, leaving many former contributors to head to different, more open minded, websites.

It appears that Eater is one such site because they have just offered to post anything that has been inexplicably removed from the Chowhound site. They are able to do this because the "offending" posts are not removed from the Chowhound feed as quickly as they are from the site, so there is a window of time where it is possible to retrieve the posts. Of course, you will have to contact the staff to let them know if your post was stricken, but it will be interesting to see what types of pieces are selected for removal.

When Allrecipes redid their layout back in October, the design was met with less than positive reviews from users, who complained about the readability of the text, the number of advertisements and the difficulty of actually locating the main recipe on the page. Epicurious, one of the other leading online recipe sites, is now testing out a new look for their recipe pages. Fortunately, they don't seem to be going to extremes with their makeover.

The old view had a banner ad at the top of the recipe and put the user ratings, menu suggestions and related links down the left-hand side of the page. The new layout eliminates the top banner ad and moves the user reviews onto the right-hand column. The ads that used to appear in the sidebar have been eliminated as well and that space is now occupied with links to reference guides and the Epicurious recipe feed link. Along the top of the recipe, there are several tabs that make it easy to switch between the photo, reviews and the recipe itself without relying on the browser's back button.

Overall? The changes look good and it probably won't be long before Epicurious switches over to the new layout completely.

[thanks, alanna!]

The idea behind most food websites, food blogs included, is to write about good food. Good recipes, excellent restaurants and tasty products are among the things frequently written up on these sites. Wild Recipes has a slightly different goal, however. The site is dedicated to the weirdest, most outrageous - by which they usually mean disgusting - foods that people actually eat.

Old fashioned scrapple, Rocky Mountain oysters, head cheese and brains are all included on the site, but there are far stranger dishes than the ones that simply involve cooking the less appetizing bits of animals. For example, how would you feel about a Spam milkshake (pictured) with anchovies, mustard and beer? Or would you be likely to put a few slices of Cheddar cheese in your morning coffee then "slurp down the glob of melted cheese" once you've finished off the liquid? Granted, the cheese coffee is unappealing in a way that is different from the "oysters," but that doesn't make it any less disgusting.

Most of the entries have recipes should you be so inclined to try them and there are seven pages of dishes to choose from, and just about all of them are accompanied by a story describing how the submitter first came across the dish.

[via neatorama]

According to some estimates, the average Thanksgiving dinner can have up to 4,500 calories - and that's per person, not for the whole meal. No wonder more than a few of us need to loosen our belts afterwards! But the holiday comes only once a year and it would be a shame to miss out on some of our favorites, from mashed potatoes and gravy to pecan pie. One solution is to keep all the same dishes, but lighten up the recipes slightly. The website Eat Better America - which is primarily geared towards providing simple, straightforward nutrition and fitness information to keep you living and eating healthy - has one particular feature that might come in handy for Thanksgiving prep. Called Healthify My Recipe, users of the site can submit favorite recipes and have them lightened up by the EBA food experts, cutting back the calories and fat without skimping on flavor. They already have recipes for gravy, pumpkin pie and mashed potatoes up, with both the "healthified" and "unhealthified" versions, all of which are perfect for Thanksgiving. In addition to the altered recipes, the site also has a basic recipe section, with tasty, but good for you, recipes geared towards those with specific eating concerns.

[Thanks, Nichole!]

Are you looking for a good resource on diets and dieting information? Diet Television, which is a website, unlike the name suggests, launched this week and it offers "unbiased opinions from experts and from people just like you" on more than 47 different diets. Best of all, the site is completely free.

It was founded by some of the executives from the online shopping site Bluefly who wanted to build a community where people could support each other and get access to nutritionists, fitness experts, technology gurus and human behavioral specialists. Perhaps most importantly, the creators of the site admit that with all the diet-knowledge that they themselves have accumulated, they don't have a favorite diet, so the user-oriented site has no agenda besides helping you get healthy, lose those holiday pounds, or just answer any random questions you might have about a given diet or food. To start out, try the diet finder to identify your best match based on your likes, dislikes and goals.

The site is only in the first phase of its launch right now and there is more to come starting in 2007, so take a look at what they have to offer, but don't forget to try it again for a send helping in a couple of months.

[Thanks, Elise!]

GroupRecipes is a website about people, food, recipes and bringing those elements together. It is an interactive space where you can read, write and rate recipes, build your own personal page and meet (virtually, anyway) other foodies. Eventually, as the community grows, it could evolve into being some kind of hybrid between myspace or another social-networking site and allrecipes, with a group blog and a common interest in food binding everything together.

At the moment, the recipes are one of the sites biggest draws - though judging from some of the profiles already up on the site, there are a number of interesting people already using it - and the ways in which recipes can be tagged is particularly interesting. Not only can they be identified by category (e.g. "cookies" or "breakfast"), but by flavor, as well, so if you are in the mood for nutmeg, you'll be able to find something to satisfy your craving.

One of my favorite discoveries so far is a recipe for Oatmeal Cookie Granola, but I'm still exploring the site myself. Check it out if you have the chance. I suspect that it's going to be a hit.

There is a new website geared towards those who, like so many of us, spend a lot of time shopping and looking for that one great deal on an exotic sea salt, a rare olive oil, or a really decadent dessert. One Gourmet Goodie spotlights one gourmet food item every day and offers it at a discount price. The downside is that the selection is limited and the offer only lasts for 24 hours, but the upside is that this results in a fairly substantial discount. There are sites that offer this "deal of the day" type of service for other goods and services, but this is the first one that I've encountered that does so with things just for foodies.

Past items included a Halloween Cake sampler from Black Hound Bakery in New York (pictured), Chocolate Peanut Butter Brownies from Simply Divine Heavenly Brownies, Chocolate Wine & Liqueur Sauce 2 Pack from Anette's Chocolates Napa Valley and an assortment of Cheddars from around the World. There are five new items each week, with the Friday item available throughout the weekend.

Back in April, we noted that Reader's Digest bought Allrecipes.com and there was some speculation that they might change the user-friendly site for the worse, especially since they said that they planed to use it as "the main portal to its other magazines and websites." So far, there really have been no major changes to the site, but it appears to have just undergone a major facelift. The new site (there is a site tour so you can figure out how to use it) seems to have given a much more prominent space to affiliated magazines and advertising partners and also seems to put more emphasis on the few top-rated recipes from every category. The biggest change is in layout. Instead of the fairly well-spaced pages that we were used to, where all of the non-recipe content was grouped on the right side of the page, it now seems that every bit of the screen is utilized, drawing attention away from the recipe.

They still have a great recipe database, though, so whether you like the new layout or not, there are still plenty of reasons to use the site.

After far, far too long a time with their slow-loading yet content-less website, Trader Joe's has upgraded to something worth visiting. The site now offers a complete look at the history and values of the privately-owned company, as well as the same information on new locations and copies of their latest "Fearless Flyer" newsletter.

The best thing about the site is that they now have a great display of their new items. Once you select your location from the drop-down menu, a page with pictures and descriptions of some of the new products in your area comes up. I already found that Cheddar with Mango, Chile & Lime is a new type of cheese ("one of the most unique cheeses (ever!)") currently being offered, a product I might not have noticed simply stocked on the shelves. They also have a useful FAQ that answers some questions about labels and nutrition, in addition to clearing up the ever-present concern of whether Trader Joe's products will turn you "into a superhero, a professional athlete or one of the great brainiacs of humankind."

Great job with the website overhaul, TJs. We love having a site that we can use!

Thanks to Sarah, we now know which universities the Princeton Review thinks have the best on-campus food, but most college students will be happy to tell you that off-campus food is almost always better. With schools starting up right and left, students need to be prepared to find those places because greasy pizzas and pb&j gets boring pretty quickly. CampusFood.com is a website that allows users to search for lists of off-campus eateries and order their food online from the menus published on the site. Their ever-growing database includes independent restaurants and chains. Delivery is up to the individual restaurant (some only allow pick-up orders), but not only is this a boon to college students who want to really streamline their days, it is good for small restaurants whose primary business comes from college student, making them more accessible to their tech-savvy (and hungry) customer base.

By the way, the services offered by the website are not limited to college students - anyone can order food online as long as they are near enough for either delivery or pickup.