Find rising stars - not hyped restaurants

July 16, 2024

What if you can find a new local restaurant, before it gets widely known and trendy? You'll be able to enjoy it while it's new, more affordable, and less crowded!

But how do you find a place after it just opened? I took this into my own hands and wrote some code. It works with the Google Maps API, and scans my neighboorhhod to find restaurants that are not yet in a "master list" that I keep - then it alerts me to these new finds.

So here is the basic logic I implemented - each week I run the following code:

1. I create a 10 by 10 grid of latitude and longitude pairs around me.

2. I run Google Maps API search for each point on that grid and I concatenate all those results

3. Then I compare it with the previous week's master list of results: If there is a new name, that's my new restaurant! I also need to update the master list

4. I save back the master list of results - which will be used to compare against next week's results

5. I save back any new results for this week!

Finally - I want to automate this. So I created a docker container image with the code, and I scheduled a Google Cloud Run job to run that container once a week. Last week I found a new grilled fish restaurant, and a new kebab shop!

You can find the code here on my GitHub. If you feel inspired to use it and improve it - Happy tastings. 👨🍳