Nithya and I have been big fans of the Diners, Drive-ins and Dives show hosted by Guy Fieri on the Food Network. We love the fact that it travels the country looking for the small anonymous restaurants that serve great food without emptying your wallet.
One day we were wondering if any of the show restaurants were in the Bay Area when I stumbled on this page that lists all the eateries they have visited on the show. Now the list is a good thing to have but is not much use to see an address like “Baker, CA” since I have no idea where that is (near Death Valley). What you ideally want is a map that shows the locations of all the restaurants – that way you can look in your city and see if there are any local places. This is where my inner hacker got interested and I ended up writing this PHP script that downloads the list page and parses the HTML to build a list of the restaurants along with their addresses and any other available information. It then outputs a kml file which opens in Google Earth and shows you a map with each restaurant denoted by an individual pushpin (see screenshot below). Clicking on a pushpin or selecting a restaurant name from the left menu will give you more information such as the address, phone number and any available website.
Caveats:
1) As always this is a mashup with no implied warranties – use at your own risk.
2) You must have Google Earth installed to view the script.
3) Since this script is actually parsing live HTML so that it will remain up-to-date as they add more restaurants. This does mean that it Food Network decides to change or remove the listing page this mashup will stop working. Let me know if that happens but there are no guarantees that I will fix it.
4) Google Earth has to individually geocode all of the restaurant addresses. This process should take about 30 seconds and you will see the push-pins individually appearing on the map.
Now that you have been warned, click here and have fun visiting Diners, drive-ins and dives. I personally plan on visiting as many of them as I can and started with dinner at the Falafels Drive-In in San Jose last week.
Update (15-Mar-09): Thanks to the commenters who mentioned that the list was not current – it looks like Food Network changed their naming convention which was breaking the script. I’ve put in a new workaround and the script should now work for all episodes including season 6. I’ve also added a new search feature in the KML itself which adds a allow you to look up the recipes and episode information for each of the restaurants. The search feature is still a work in progress so it may not work 100% of the time. Happy Eating!!!
Update (24-June-09): Check out my map of Throwdown with Bobby Flay competitors at http://www.rahulnair.net/blog/2009/06/24/map-of-throwdown-with-bobby-flay-competitors/
Update (20-July-09): Yet another map mashup, this time of The Best Thing I Ever Ate
