Ineffective. Most tend to ignore email / SMS notifications. Have you tried Yelp? It's available both for mobile and desktop. Pretty neat. - Mona Nomura

@Mona Possible correction, you can send an SMS "request" to receive a suggestion from the system. The problem with Yelp is that I need to know what I want to eat. The point of something like this is that you don't. - Steve Spalding

And how would you suggest a program to know that? With the 'foodie' trend, the range is just too wide for an accurate algorithm. There are way too many genres, imho. I wouldn't trust a service like that. -just saying. - Mona Nomura

@Mona Well those are still edge cases. Your "average" person sticks to some fairly set genres. The algorithm would be pretty simple, If you haven't eaten there before && it doesn't seem like something crazy based on your last three restaurant choices then offer it up as a suggestion. You aren't forced to take the suggestions and there is always ways to use trending data from other people to make things more accurate. It would be the same as any other recommendation engine. - Steve Spalding

@Mona I definitely get what you're saying but we do similar sorts of data-crunching/statistical modeling for everything from shopping to music already. - Steve Spalding