Urbanspoon officially went live today, with restaurant reviews, maps and menus for the Seattle area. Ethan and I have been working hard on urbanspoon for some time, and it feels good to reveal our baby at last.

Urbanspoon let’s you slice and dice the Seattle restaurant scene by neighborhood, cuisine and popularity. We link to restaurants reviews from five authoritative Seattle sources – The Seattle PI, The Seattle Times, The Stranger, The Seattle Weekly, and Citysearch. Users can vote on their favorite restaurants, and the most popular restaurants are prominently featured on all pages. We seeded the vote tallies using the scores from those five authoritative Seattle sources, but those numbers will quickly change as people start to vote.

Here are some other useful things you can do on Urbanspoon:

• We have complete menus for some restaurants. Send us more and we’ll add them!

• I love Malena’s, and I was thrilled to find that it’s the most popular restaurant in Queen Anne.

• Check out Ethan’s votes, or mine.

• I always knew the sandwiches at Macrina were excellent.

• Want to see a list of all the Burger Kings in Seattle? How about a list of all the restaurant chains?

• The search box is more powerful than you might expect. Some examples:
  Wild Ginger
  Pho Bac 98104
  Sushi
  Queen Anne Thai

• Does this McDonald’s really serve Sushi? Use the “Edit this restaurant page” to send us corrections.

Urbanspoon was intended to be a fun testbed for our technology ideas, but it seems to have taken on a life of its own. Stay tuned!