Meet J’Eatout, the local food app for picky eaters and social media haters

A local mom and app developer’s newest invention began with a complaint. Caryn McKenna and her sister-in-law went looking for something that didn’t exist: “a journal of where you’ve eaten, what you liked, and what you didn’t.” Because, as a busy mom, it’s easy to forget exactly which meal your kids loved, and sometimes even the name of a wonderful restaurant you once visited. Everything on the market, they found, was geared toward the opinions and approval of strangers instead of friends and family. McKenna spoke with Pittsburgh City Paper about how her new app J’Eatout came together. On a trip to Orlando, McKenna’s family fell head over heels for a restaurant and then lost track of its name. That instance inspired McKenna. And then, as she began noodling on her idea for an app, practical family needs entered the mix. She took into consideration a relative in Pittsburgh who eats selectively, picky kids, and McKenna herself, who manages a gluten intolerance. Taking everything into consideration, the app married the ideas of nostalgia for your family’s favorite meals and a place for people to journal about how to eat out safely. “It’s nice to have a record of where you ate, whether you’d go back, and whether there was ever an allergic reaction,” McKenna tells City Paper , “so you know not to eat there, or that dish, again.” McKenna wanted to keep the app as simple as possible. Her thumbs-up, thumbs-down, and neutral rating system came first. Then she developed a way to log who was at the table — “a whole screen for managing your people,” says McKenna. “You log the restaurant, add the dishes, and assign each one to whoever ordered it.” Because the whole point was to keep things among people who trust each other, private sharing had to be part of her design. A review can be sent by text or email, and whoever receives it sees it rendered cleanly inside the app, with the option to save it or delete it. The J’Eatou