#100wordreview – Yalla Yalla [Food]

12 Winsley Street, London W1W 8HQ

Yalla Yalla serves ‘Beirut street food’. The place was buzzing when we stopped for lunch, though service was quick. We punted for 4 mezze dishes for two of us; each costing £4-5. Good choice for veggies. Dishes were a nice size and 4 was plenty. I sampled the falafel, spinach fatayer and vine leaves. The chunky, spicy falafel and refreshingly lemony vine leaves made for a tasty meal, but the spinach fatayer was dry and weirdly sweet. Without houmous or baba ganoush, it was all a little too dry, which resulted in us guzzling some nice lemonades from their selection.

#AppIdea – TipWell

I hate tipping. At best it holds down wages; at worst it’s unfair and discriminatory. But society pressures me to tip. I don’t want to look cheap. The solution – TipWell.

Instead of your money going to the waitress or the taxi driver, it goes to charity. Let’s take the example of a meal in a restaurant. Here’s how TipWell should work:

  1. Your bill arrives: £46.20 total.
  2. You get your phone out and open TipWell. You select ‘restaurant’.
  3. Using your location, the phone figures out which restaurant you’re at. You then take a look at your bill and see your waitress’s name was Deirdre, so you type ‘Deirdre’ into the appropriate box. There’s also the opportunity to leave a little message. The app records the time and date of your visit.
  4. You input the total bill amount and select the percentage you’d like to tip; 10%, as is customary in the UK.
  5. You select which charity you’d like your money to go to; let’s say, Amnesty International.
  6. Using PayPal, you complete your payment of £4.62 to Amnesty International.
  7. Waiters and patrons alike then log on to the TipWell website and build profiles for themselves. Patrons can see how much they have tipped, waiters can see how much they’ve earned for charity. They can also see messages left by diners.
  8. Everybody in the world stops tipping. Fewer people want to be waiters as they know they won’t get tips. Restaurateurs have to pay their staff more.

Somebody please build this.