Tags are cool. Foodtags are super-cool.
While I was planning the website design for Gatto’s Restaurant & Bar, a few things regarding the Menus section became clear:
1) that Gatto’s offers a whole lot of items.
2) that if you break each item down to it’s basic ingredients, combined you have a large amount of data. Currently 317 ingredients…and counting–and I left out salt, pepper, stuff like that.

‘Managing large amounts of data’ is practically my job description as a web developer these days, and I’ve been using tags for bookmarking and photo organization via sites like flick and delicious and I find them invaluable. As an example, I have a tag at delicious that I’ve been adding to for a while now tagged “inspiration”. It’s not about posters with cats in trees over the caption hang in there!, it’s about great websites I’ve visited that left a mark–the really really good ones. Here it is:
http://delicious.com/patmccarthy68/inspiration. When I feel a design or inspirational block, I often head there to fire those synapsis a bit harder.

Well, back to Gatto’s and foodtags. ‘Menu descriptions’ is one area that, up until now, was provided pretty much exclusively from the servers or carryout person on duty. The owners and I decided it was time to use the website for this purpose. I’ve been working as a server at Gatto’s New Lenox for almost four years now, so I have the menu pretty well memorized, although I will admit, there were a few suprises as I dug deeper into each dish.