Bellevue Business: Restaurant Review App Dishonit Delivers On The Go

Credit the Thai food.

Nikhil Hasija got the idea for dishonit.com, a Bellevue-based food review site, more than five years ago, thanks to a craving for Thai green curry that struck him while on a trip in San Francisco.

Frustrated at not being able to discern among many local Thai restaurants which one would have what he wanted, he sat in a coffee shop and made a quick back-of-the-envelope design for a mobile app that would help people suss out sustenance.

Back home in Bellevue, he and his wife, Liliana Hasija, and their colleague, Anusidh Pavamontri, realized that the mobile technology at that time wasn’t quite ripe for the endeavor. They shelved it until February 2010, when other mobile apps, like FourSquare, had proven the market was ready.

After about seven months of development and testing, Dishonit was launched in November, and really started to take the world of foodies by the palate in January, Nikhil Hasija says.

The application offers, simply, a way for users to share reviews of specific dishes at restaurants around the world, along with a GPS locator that can help the hungry find a restaurant near where the user is standing.

Users rate restaurant dishes on a scale of “yums”—yum yum, yum, yawn, or yuck—all color-coded so you can easily see what people thought of the taste.

The app focuses strongly on the food, leaving as many characters as about two tweets for people to comment with their rating.

“It gets to the heart of the food,” says Paula Mahlberg, of Redmond, who joined the team in marketing and public relations after she discovered the site. “Ambience and atmosphere matter to a point, but Dishonit cuts through all that and tells me what’s good.”

Hasija says the company doesn’t reveal how many users it has, but he says registrations have been growing since Window Phone Marketplace featured the app recently. Now, the company has launched an Android version, which Hasija says will make it more accessible to a broader base.

In addition to ratings, the site includes analytics to let you track your own eating habits, from what you eat most, to what day of the week you tend to go out to eat. Hasija says the site seems to encourage users to try new foods, which caught the team off-guard.

“The discovery aspect came as a surprise to us,” he says.

The company remains in a discovery mode, too, working to add features. It wants protection from cloud outages, so it is trying to transfer server space to different providers. The company is home-based in Bellevue and Redmond, but Hasija says it may lease office space later this year.

The company is on a shoestring budget, he says, and it is still fleshing out the future potential income stream.

“We have a laser-sharp focus on keeping costs down,” he says. The founders agreed that seeking financing too early could dilute the value of what they were trying to accomplish, but Hasija says Dishonit might seek a cash infusion.

Hasija, a veteran of Microsoft as well as several tech initiatives, encourages other startups to go into their ventures with eyes wide-open and a flexible budget.

“In the romanticized vision, you think about what you are going to do, not what is going to be done to you,” he says. “You have to be agile through that process.”

And, we might add, a little hungry.