Menutopia is a new restaurant review community launched last week bringing thousands of United States restaurants and menus to your computer. Menutopia offers its users a site to review and rate restaurants, search for menus, and even order food online from over 1,000 delivery restaurants in New York. Currently, users can find menus for restaurants in Manhattan, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami, although some areas may have more menus then others.

Menutopia is much more then just a menu site. You can browse restaurants by neighborhood, cuisine, or tags (more like categories) and filter out restaurants that serve breakfast, lunch, or dinner and more. When viewing a restaurant, you can not only view the restaurants menu, but to learn about the restaurant by reading user reviews and ratings. You can also retrieve a restaurants contact information, see where the restaurant is located on a Google Map, learn if reservations are required, find open hours, and even order food online if available.

Signing up to Menutopia also brings more functionality to the site. When logging in, users can add restaurants to a favorites list, make reviews and ratings, add and track friends, and create lists of resturants to, for example, note pizza places in a specific area. When a user creates a list, they are also given the option to share it with the community by making them public.

Menutopia is a neat service, although I have no use for it because I don’t live in any of the supported areas. However, I found it easy to find restuarants, especially when using Menutopia’s smart search, and feel if I lived in one of the supported areas, it could help out greatly. I also found the interface to be very well designed. The user reviews and ratings appear to be accurate and there’s already quite a bit of content on the site. Similar services include MenuTree and GopherNow.

Update: Sorry, jumped the gun a bit on available locations and rewards. Dan of Menutopia has informed me that they are only live with Manhattan at this time and other cities are coming in the next week or two. Although, when I go into account settings and set my account to a different area, it appears I can browse through restaurants (IE: San Francisco brings up 1,797 menus). Dan has also told me that the rewarding functionality is not live yet but will be once everything is settled. If that’s the case, they should probably get rid of the Learn More about Earning Rewards section.

Update: Removed part of review on rewards to not build up expectations, as requested by Menutopia. They also said I was able to access these other pages because of a little mixup that occurred on the site and they should be fixed now.