North London Food & Culture

Vote for your favourite Kentish Town eating and drinking spots

Our ‘people’s choice’ Twitter poll launches today, to uncover your pick of the best in 2014

What was your favourite local place for a meal - or a tipple - in 2014?
What was your favourite local place for a meal – or a tipple – in 2014?
For our final print edition of the year (coming to a free distribution point near you, from Friday December 5th), we’ll be celebrating the very best food and drinks hangouts in the area.

2014 has been a fantastically foodie twelve months in NW5: as much for the hot new openings as the growing confidence and success of our more established restaurants, bars, pubs and cafes.

But with so many excellent choices in this neighbourhood alone, how do you tell which one really is the top dog, the big cheese, the whole enchilada?

Twizoo app in action - can technology find you a better burger?
Twizoo app in action – can technology find you a better burger?

Well, to answer that all-important question, we’ve called upon the help of Twizoo, a new mobile app that finds the best places to eat or drink, based on real-time Twitter buzz.


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They have been analyzing millions of tweets about London’s food and drink hotspots all year, so we’re really looking forward to crunching all the data for Kentish Town to see what it reveals. And from today until next Monday (Nov 24th) you all have the chance to vote for a ‘people’s choice’ winner for 2014 too.

All you need to do is add the hashtag #Twizoo when tweeting about the restaurant, bar, pub or café in question. We’ll get the Twizoo guys to do some complicated algorithm stuff, and publish the scientific findings in our December print edition.

There are over 150 places in the running in the local area (defined as centered on the NW5 postcode), meaning every tweet counts. And there are sure to be a few surprises too, so get involved and support your favourites. It’s super easy.

Twizoo is part-funded by the innovations charity Nesta, much like Kentishtowner was back in 2012, so we’re happy to team up with them, helping their service to grow, while enjoying their tech expertise.

We also really like their mission: to improve on the horror of public review websites such as Tripadvisor, swerving the usual ferocious negativity or fake glowing praise (you know the kind) in favour of real opinions and genuine recommendations.

You can download the Twizoo app for iOS or for Android and follow them on Twitter @TwizooLondon, although none of that is a requirement to vote, for which you simply need to compose a quick tweet. Go on, do one now…

9 thoughts on “Vote for your favourite Kentish Town eating and drinking spots”

  1. But won’t the results be horribly skewed in the favour of places like us (Arancini Bros) and others (Zing zing, Pizza East et al.) who have multiple branches running off a single twitter account? I’ve already noticed Twizoo favouriting tweets made to our Dalston branch, and don’t see how an algorithm could determine someone’s intended target….Perhaps this is something you could suggest they tweak with geographic metadata . Great idea though and I’m sure everyone will get into it enthusiastically…

  2. Hmm yes – let’s see which is the best* restaurant in Kentish Town

    * that has the most tech-literate clientele and that is able to mobilise the best social media campaign

  3. ‘ello there! Twizoo here. Responding your good questions and thoughts!

    @julie1916 – You don’t need the Twizoo app to vote! For ‘People’s Choice’, and all things Twizoo, we listen to everyone’s Tweets about London’s eating and drinking spots. In fact, we’ve picked up over 10 million just this year!

    @Andy K – perhaps you’re right. But like @Kentishtowner says, we’re really trying to be a more reputable place for the ‘crowdsourced’ opinion about places than say TripAdvisor. A steep order, but we’re trying!

    @Dave – good point on Geo. We do this if the Tweet is geotagged, but less than 1% of the Tweets are. We’re getting better at attributing Tweets to only a specific branch if the person says in the Tweet which location they are at, but we need to get even better. However, one useful thing to know is that our app isn’t biased towards multi-branch places– we don’t take into account sheer volume alone, or places like Starbucks would always net out as recommended on our app. Techy explanation: we normalize volume against # of branches across London.

    @Martin, @Neil – polls are nice, but you probably wouldn’t have millions of entries, as we’ve had this year on Twitter. #justsayin

    Any more questions, just shout or drop us a line at hello at twizoo dot com. Always happy to chat, we’re the new kids on the block and interested in hearing all opinions!

Leave a Comment

9 thoughts on “Vote for your favourite Kentish Town eating and drinking spots”

  1. But won’t the results be horribly skewed in the favour of places like us (Arancini Bros) and others (Zing zing, Pizza East et al.) who have multiple branches running off a single twitter account? I’ve already noticed Twizoo favouriting tweets made to our Dalston branch, and don’t see how an algorithm could determine someone’s intended target….Perhaps this is something you could suggest they tweak with geographic metadata . Great idea though and I’m sure everyone will get into it enthusiastically…

  2. Hmm yes – let’s see which is the best* restaurant in Kentish Town

    * that has the most tech-literate clientele and that is able to mobilise the best social media campaign

  3. ‘ello there! Twizoo here. Responding your good questions and thoughts!

    @julie1916 – You don’t need the Twizoo app to vote! For ‘People’s Choice’, and all things Twizoo, we listen to everyone’s Tweets about London’s eating and drinking spots. In fact, we’ve picked up over 10 million just this year!

    @Andy K – perhaps you’re right. But like @Kentishtowner says, we’re really trying to be a more reputable place for the ‘crowdsourced’ opinion about places than say TripAdvisor. A steep order, but we’re trying!

    @Dave – good point on Geo. We do this if the Tweet is geotagged, but less than 1% of the Tweets are. We’re getting better at attributing Tweets to only a specific branch if the person says in the Tweet which location they are at, but we need to get even better. However, one useful thing to know is that our app isn’t biased towards multi-branch places– we don’t take into account sheer volume alone, or places like Starbucks would always net out as recommended on our app. Techy explanation: we normalize volume against # of branches across London.

    @Martin, @Neil – polls are nice, but you probably wouldn’t have millions of entries, as we’ve had this year on Twitter. #justsayin

    Any more questions, just shout or drop us a line at hello at twizoo dot com. Always happy to chat, we’re the new kids on the block and interested in hearing all opinions!

Leave a Comment

About Kentishtowner

The award-winning print and online title Kentishtowner was founded in 2010 and is part of London Belongs To Me, a citywide network of travel guides for locals. For more info on what we write about and why, see our About section.