When Emilia Echeveste first moved to Gainesville in Fall 2015, she mostly ate at Subway, Blaze Pizza and the on-campus dining halls.
It wasn’t until the 20-year-old UF marine sciences sophomore’s second semester that she visited more local restaurants, she said.
For Jason Farnum, a 25-year-old UF alumnus, this was something he wanted to change. To highlight local restaurants’ best-selling dishes, he co-founded an app called Talace alongside Wei Fan, Eric and Dawei.
Talace, a visual guide to Gainesville dining, shows photos of the best-selling dishes of various local restaurants. It’s been available for about a week and features about 150 restaurants, ranging from seafood to Middle Eastern cuisines.
In picking items to feature, Farnum and his team visited each local restaurant on the app and asked the community which foods were the most popular, he said.
“(People) sometimes avoid a restaurant because they don’t know what to order, especially at foreign place,” Farnum said. “We built Talace to be like a directory of top menu items at local restaurants.”
The app shows the name and price of a dish underneath its photo.
Farnum and his team are still updating the app, and he said they hope to add a mobile ordering feature to it.
Echeveste said she wants to start using the app.
“Looking through the app allowed me to see the many restaurants and food in Gainesville without going out of my way. It’s right there,” she said.
