This seems like a very good idea...

I recently happened to be in a Starbucks where, interestingly, the staff members were chatting about how a customer had labeled this location as a "non-cozy" one. I presume the customer in question posted this comment somewhere on the web... The funny thing is that this 'bucks is more hard-edged Irish pub than prim faculty club, so it seemed to me to be a very fair comment.

But when we post an e-pinion, or blog comment or a comment on a rating service like Yelp! how do we know that the business we're describing actually hears our voice? Well, when it comes to restaurants we now have a two-way site called BooRah.com. This is a site, based in Mountain View, California, that both collects and posts restaurant reviews - you can see the ones for your own community by going to the site and you can search for reviews from other cities - and scours the internet for more reviews and comments on particular restaurants.

If you go to BooRah, you'll notice that selected reviews are posted but not all of them. If the restaurant owner wants to see all of them, he/she can subscribe for a small fee with BooRah to see every comment/review that the web service finds using search instruments. You will see a 1 to 100 percent rating at BooRah for each restaurant, summarizing the positive versus negative reviews. For example, I earlier posted my favorable comments on the Sombrero Mexican restaurant in Mission Valley, San Diego (one of 340 Mexican restaurants in San Diego listed by BooRah). BooRah shows a 100% favorable rating for this chain restaurant at this location.

I see two key benefits: first, we the consumers are not wasting our time making comments on the world wide web because Boorah will find them and publish them; second, the restaurants that subscribe to view the customer reviews will hopefully take them to heart and make the needed changes to keep their customers and boost their approval ratings.

Come to think of it, a few nice couches and padded chairs would look nice in my local Starbucks... and maybe a few nice heavy throws and a working cat or two!

(The photograph shows the co-founders of BooRah.)

Good Mexican food at low prices...

I've been reading, in such places as USA Today, that there's a lot of online interest in places that serve good food at low prices. I found such a place in the Mission Valley area of San Diego and it's called Sombrero Mexican Food at 8590 Rio San Diego Road. This is one of at least eight locations in the San Diego City area, with more outlets nearby in other southern California jurisdictions from Riverside to Imperial counties.

I happened to fly into San Diego on a very early morning when I'd skipped breakfast and was starving by the time I arrived at the Marriott, Mission Valley (a very nice hotel, by the way, where I've stayed on two occasions). This Sombrero location is northwest from the hotel and only about an extra-long city block away.

As I walked in, this Sombrero appeared to be a mix between a mom-and-pop restaurant and a fast food outlet; it's a bit of both. The posted menu is a simple, basic and minimal one and the staff was fine with serving the food as plain as I like it. I ordered the two beef tamale plate, no cheese, with rice and beans and a large beer - make that root beer. The tab came to all of $7.60. Suffice it to say that the portions were big enough to constitute both lunch and dinner without argument.

I subsequently hiked back to my room at the Marriott to take an afternoon siesta, purring like our cat Munchy. Sombrero reminded me of both a similar restaurant in Reno that's no longer open, the Alamo, and of Emma's Taco House in West Sacramento. The latter has been in operation - depending on whom you believe - since either 1949 or 1951.

On a five taco scale, Sombrero of Mission Valley gets 4.5 for the food and 4.85 for the value. As California's governor might have stated, I'll be back.