“Cookthink is totally awesome!” and other nice reviews

We hope you won’t mind a little pre-weekend, tooting-our-own-horn post. We just wanted to share with you some of the great press Cookthink’s been getting lately.

• Springwise picked us up, thanks to Jacqueline Zenn: “Take high-quality content, add a dash of searchability and a dollop of personalization, and what do you get? A culinary version of the music discovery engine Pandora, with the potential to be just as much of a success among foodies around the world.”

• Lifehacker followed soon after: “Web site Cookthink turns your cravings into reality, matching recipes with cravings by ingredient, cuisine, dish, or mood… In all it’s a one-stop shop for finding meals based on what you have and what cravings you’re looking to satisfy. Most of the recipes, I should add, look mighty tasty.”

• At PC Magazine’s App Scout, contributor Alan Henry broke down the Cookthink process: “Regardless of what you’re craving, Cookthink can help you find a recipe that matches the flavors you’re looking for… Cookthink was designed to help people take the types of foods and flavors they’re craving and turn them into real meal suggestions.”

• After playing around with Cookthink some more, Alan followed up at his blog Gears and Widgets: “Some people seem to think that any site about food has to be a massive database of recipes, and Cookthink isn’t that. The idea is to guide you to flavors and meal ideas that match the mood you’re in or the tastes that you enjoy; and it does that spectacularly well. If you’re looking for an all-inclusive list of recipes that you simply can’t stump even with the wildest requests, you might try Epicurious.com or someplace similar. Cookthink is a completely different animal, and considering its goal, it’s an animal I want to keep around to help my girlfriend and I decide what’s for dinner.”

• At Software Battle, Eric Norton did the Cookthink double-take: “On first glance, I almost mistook Cookthink as just another recipe site. Type in a couple of ingredients and it searches the database. But Cookthink, thankfully enough, is far more than a simple recipe site. It offers enough uniqueness to set it apart from staples like AllRecipes.com and Cooks.com. Yes, it has a “Web 2.0” flare to it, but there is much more working here than meets the eye.”

• While Brad Linder at downloadsquad quibbles with our use of “craving” (fair enough), he was still impressed with Cookthink: ” Ever have a craving for fish, but no recipe handy for turning your craving into dinner? Cookthink can help… As a keyword/tag based recipe finder, Cookthink is excellent.”

• fresharrival’s Chris Coyier was unflummoxed by our beta label: “I was pleasantly surprised [by] how fun and easy to use it was right off the bat… The site looks great, has tons of nice content (a blog, tips, reference, tips…), and is snappy. And they are still in Beta!”

• After playing around with the site for a while, Kate at infodoodads got excited about putting together a meal consisting only of broccoli raab: “Though the site has lots of features, like a food-related reference section with good definitions and explanations of tools, techniques, and ingredients, the most unique feature is a search by “craving”. Just type in up to eight cravings (be they ingredients, types of cuisine, types of dish, or “moods”) and then “cookthink it” to see a recipe suggestion based on your choices. It’s fun to see the suggested recipe that pops up, and if it’s not what you’re looking for there’s an option to see more. Also, recipes are accompanied by related tips and other recipes which will help me put together an entire meal based on my recent obsession with broccoli raab.”

• Christopher at iMod gave the site a spin and came away with this impression: “Cookthink is totally awesome!”

One last note: Back in December, Brys and I went to the Web Design World conference in Boston. (Great time.) At the end of the conference, several of the speakers — Jeffrey Zeldman, Lance Loveday, Steve Mulder and Jim Heid — got together and reviewed some of the attendees’ websites. I wish we had a link because it was really exciting to hear them review Cookthink. We don’t have a link, so you’ll have to trust us when we say that they all loved it. Citing “the very elegant simplicity of the layout,” Mulder loved how “the eye goes to where you want it to go… This is so much fun to play with, and the photography’s really beautiful.” Zeldman loved the colors we used at Cookthink. As he began to see how all the recipes and reference were connected at Cookthink, he said, “This is a web 2.0 cooking site. It’s a discovery site. I mean, I had no idea what “poke” meant until somebody poked me and then I poked them and then I got it.” Loveday admiringly described what we do as “reverse engineering the recipe,” and Heid wrapped it all by saying, “This is a very cool site.”