Before board bills tie us down to dining-hall food come fall, students living on or off campus can take advantage of dining out guilt-free. With a plethora of culinary options up and down the Peninsula, readers of The Weekly may find themselves lost for advice. Although The Weekly — and thus, Weekly food reviews — will take a short hiatus until the start of the school year, there are many helpful tools for navigating the many cafés and restaurants in the Bay Area and beyond.

Yelp.com

Yelp.com is a very helpful site, rating businesses over time and doing great distribution of data. The site, whose COO is Stanford alum Geoff Donaker ‘95, actually has some really great reviews of restaurants in the Bay Area. For example, Café Del Sol in Menlo Park has 32 reviews, with the average rating of all reviews shown up top, along with photos of the eatery. The site also boasts a set of additional information, such as price range, whether alcohol is available, outdoor seating options, parking information, types of payments accepted and whether it is good for groups. If you know you like an eatery, you’ll find the sidebar very interesting — it shows places where other viewers of the same restaurant have dined.

UrbanSpoon

Readers with iPhones may already be familiar with the application version of UrbanSpoon. On its Web site, you can pick a particular neighborhood and search for what the site claims to be the “best” in the neighborhood. Browsers can find newly rated restaurants and also search restaurants by name, type of food, popularity or price.

Upon selection, usual information such as user reviews, contact information and even suggestions for nearby restaurants appear. What helps set this site apart, however, is its Like it/Don’t Like it vote system and its compilation of reviews by professional food critics. You can also add restaurants to your wish list or mark favorites after setting up an account.

For iPhone or iPod touch users, once you select a city, a restaurant “slot machine” pops up, with three slots: neighborhood, type of food and price. Simply shake your device and out pops a recommendation. One limitation is that the Bay Area is grouped as two “cities” within the application, namely San Francisco and San Jose. You can get around this by selecting the neighborhood you want and locking that slot by touching the lock icon.

Chowhound

Chowhound.chow.com offers a way for foodies from around the world to connect and share stories. This site provides recipes for dishes and drinks to prepare at home. It also offers some neat stories, such as those in The Grinder, Chowhound’s Food Media blog. The site, however, pales in comparison with its competitors regarding actual food reviews.

Unofficial Guide

For reviews that cater to the Stanford student audience, be sure to check out past and current issues of The Daily as well as the Unofficial Guide to Stanford. The Unofficial Guide, distributed every fall to incoming students, is great for finding a place to eat. The Guide easily outlines nearby neighborhoods, illustrates the price range, and provides a quick and dirty paragraph describing the eatery and its offerings — and it holds valuable coupons in the back.

While this list certainly isn’t comprehensive, it provides a good introduction as you begin your culinary expeditions through the local area. Like Alton Brown in his popular Food Network show, I’ll wish you “Good Eats!”