A web-application to find restaurants offering gluten-free options near you!
There aren't any widely accessible APIs to retrieve menu information; but if we can Google it, then chances are we can get it (for the most part, see later).
- First we see if Google has already done the work for us. That is to say, if a restaurant's description mentions gluten-free right off the bat, then we can save some work and avoid scraping.
- The same applies to reviews. If a customer did the work already and has a testimonial of being served GF food, we simply go with that. Oftentimes, restaurants may not explicitly label items to be gluten-free, but customers go in, ask, and find out that some products are. We take that into account as well.
- If all else fails, we web-scrape the menu information, provided the menu is available via Storefront By Doordash. Some menu providers (eg. DoorDash, Grubhub, etc.) prohibit web-scraping, so if we can't access the menu, we, unfortunately, can't scrape it.
- We don't guess if something is gluten-free. If a review doesn't mention GF or a menu item isn't explicitly labeled, then we can't say for certain that the restaurant will provide gluten-free options. There may still be GF options in the area, but it's just not visible from the data.
- Support other menu providers (eg. find a way to get menus of restaurants that don't allow ordering online via foods.google)