New dining site Goodplates hopes you'll snap pictures of your meal

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Ever order the wrong thing at an otherwise great restaurant? A new start-up called Goodplates wants to prevent that sort of tabletop tragedy from befalling you again. Founded by a team of four MIT students, the Cambridge company is out raising seed funding, and presenting its first public demo to investors this week at the University Expo 2011 in Silicon Valley.

CEO Rene Reinsberg gave me an explainer of how the site will work last week, over lunch at Henrietta's Table. (Goodplates is still in invitation-only beta mode.) You'll use a mobile app to snap pictures of what you order and send it to Goodplates. You can rate the dishes, and add your comments. Other Goodplates users (or your friends, imported from other services like Facebook or Twitter) can follow you to see what you're recommending, and even choose just to see your recommendations in a particular cuisine, like French or Indian.

"Our belief is that restaurant recommendations are broken," says Reinsberg, who is graduating from MIT's Sloan School of Management this spring. "People may rely on their friends or family or a restaurant critic, or they may look at Yelp, where users tend to review the restaurant as a whole. That's why we're focusing on the dish level."

Some neat features: the site includes a full menu for more than 700 restaurants in Boston and Cambridge, with Goodplates users' recommended dishes displayed at the top. You can filter recommendations to see those of only people you've chosen to follow; also see the recommendations of people they follow; or see everyone's recommendations. When you spot a particularly tasty dish on Goodplates, you can add that to a "wish list" of stuff you'd like to try.

A big question for the site is how comfortable diners will feel whipping out their smartphones to immortalize an entreé. (And whether they'll get in the habit of using Goodplates' mobile app.) "We think there's a younger demographic that takes a picture of everything," Reinsberg says. The popular foodie community Foodspotting also encourages culinary portraiture, with the emphasis more on sharing tantalizing photos than writing reviews or ratings. (Another site, Austin, Texas based Dishola, also invites users to share photos and reviews of what they're eating, similar to Goodplates.)

How will Goodplates earn money? Reinsberg says that once Goodplates has a big enough audience, it could prove an effective new marketing channel for restaurants. He also says the start-up has "some innovative ideas to increase restaurant revenues and profits."

Collaborating with Reinsberg on Goodplates is MIT computer science researcher Marek Olszewski, who was awarded a Facebook Fellowship last month.

Reinsberg says only about 100 people have been participating in the site's beta test, but says he'll let more in over the next few weeks. So if you're a frequent diner who doesn't mind snapping pictures of your meal, request an invite.