BooRah: New restaurant review database taps into dining scenes nationwide

Want to exercise that inner restaurant critic in you? There’s a new site out there called BooRah that is looking to tap into a lot of reader-generated content about the restaurant scene in your community.

BooRah is a restaurant aggregator that culls the best restaurant reviews from across the Web and puts them in a easy-to-search database, each entry described in terms of boos and rahs. You can search major metropolitan areas or you can search for a specific town. This site seems to be pretty deep in terms of picking up obscure communities. For a test, I searched Old Hickory, Tennessee (where my father grew up) and came up with reviews of Dairy Queen, Subway, Hardees and Sonic.

O.K., hardly great. That is kind of my problem with a lot of user-generated restaurant sites. I’m all for hearing what you have to say about a new Village eatery or the best place for Sushi in San Fran, but do we really need reviews of McDonald’s and Taco Bell? Also, sometimes these “reviews” can be frustratingly general, of the “I had a great steak here!” variety.

Still, I like this site, mostly because it seems pretty comprehensive and BooRah is growing and adding new cities regularly. I searched the Boston suburb I called home for five years and found one of my favorites — a little Italian gem called Tullios in Quincy — prominently listed, along with several other good local bets.

The site says it has 1.2 million restaurant reviews, 250,000 restaurants profiled, and 150,000 menus uploaded. Not bad.

Foodies might not find everything they want here, nor those acutely tuned in to their local dining scene (you’ll know the best places to go). But I can see BooRah being very helpful to the business traveler or road tripper who likes to eat well, even in Topeka or Spokane.

Anyway, check the site out and see what you can contribute.