Yepp | Devpost

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project was to create an application for minority communities. Algorithms used by the Yelp search do not do a good job of listing restaurants that are named in a different language. Many Vietnamese restaurants in Vietnamese communities (San Jose, Garden Grove, Houston) are named in Vietnamese, making these restaurants less accessible to people who don't frequent them in the community. We want to change this. If successful this will invite new cultures to the cuisine and better the community economy.

What it does

Using datasets of Vietnamese restaurants and dishes, Yepp, is able to change the way that users find Vietnamese restaurants. Instead of a simple search, Yepp finds the restaurant depending on what the user wants to eat. Through a series of food-related questions, Yepp finds specific dishes then matches it on menus of surrounding Vietnamese restaurants--listing these restaurants to the user.

How I built it

We used the Yelp Fusion API to collect all Vietnamese restaurants in the San Jose Area. Due to the large amount of restaurants we did not log all dishes on menus from the restaurants. Instead, we created test dish data and test restaurant menu items to prove that this flow of finding restaurants would work. And it does! Users, through the questionnaire, narrow down their cravings to specific dishes then restaurants that have this dish on their menu are listed. We used React to build this web application.

Challenges I ran into

We believe that this application would work best on iOS or Android, however, due to time constraints we compromised to optimizing Yepp to mobile browser. So this application works best on screen sizes 400px - 500px. Collecting the data from the Yelp API was also difficult, we never had to deal with a data set that large. Lastly, the logic to find restaurants took quite a bit of time to fully get down.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we we're able to get a working prototype in the time allotted! It was a great experience to build this from the ground up.

What we learned

We learned about Yelp Fusion API and Flask from the mentors.

What's next for Yepp

We would like to catalog the menu items of all Vietnamese restaurants in all Vietnamese communities. Integrating this catalog into Yepp would really open up the entire cuisine to outsiders. Also, we would like to implement more features such as describing the history of Vietnamese dishes--building out the "Explore" functionality. Also, another way to provide the best recommendations would be to survey Vietnamese communities and gain insight into great local eats--pushing these locations higher up in the listings.