Couple sets up The Alien Bank, an online repository of restaurant reviews in Seoul, Gyeonggi area 


Finding the right place to eat in a new town is tricky.

It’s trickier still when the brands are unfamiliar and you are vegetarian, have other dietary requirements, or are just looking for something a bit different.

It was this that prompted Scottish couple Maureen McKendry and Paul Collins to set up the Alien bank ― a repository of restaurants in Korea.

“When we first moved here we wondered why someone hadn’t done this yet,” explained McKendry, who at first struggled to find vegetarian food in her area. “It seemed quite an obvious thing to do.”

The site lists around 700 restaurants and users can upload photos and reviews or add new restaurants.

There are similar options in Korean, and some English-language food sites allow users to comment on reviews and submit reviews of new places, but it is less reliant on user-created content and only has one review per restaurant.

At the moment the site covers restaurants in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province.

“We live quite rural so don’t want to just cover Seoul, we wanted to cover smaller towns around Seoul as well,” explains McKendry.

“The town we live in we has an Indian restaurant, an Uzbek restaurant and Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants, even though we’re quite rural because we have quite a big migrant population.

“We wanted to let people know about smaller foreign restaurants in rural places that people might not know about.”

The pair had originally thought about creating a nationwide site, but were worried about ensuring satisfactory coverage for areas with fewer users.

“We didn’t want loads of towns that have just one review or no reviews,” McKendry explained.

The pair first hatched a plan to develop the site in April, but had to wait until they could get their hands on good enough computers before they could start work.

They had previously worked as journalists in Scotland, and had worked for a listings site writing descriptions of businesses. But while they had experience of writing and knowing what information people would want, they had no experience of website design.

“We spent a lot of time going over the website trying to find potential problems,” said McKendry.

She said they had some “bobbles” to overcome, but the site has gathered more than 250 restaurant reviews since its launch in November. This is perhaps in part to the pair’s focus on ease of use.

“We wanted it to be as easy to use and straightforward as possible,” said McKendry.

They even went to Collins’ technophobic father to test the site’s user-friendliness.

“We wanted someone who didn’t know anything about computers to see if he could find anything that he couldn’t work out how to do,” said McKendry.

Visitors can log in via Facebook or separately. The process of adding a review and pictures is straightforward, and you can search by location and type of food, price range and suitability for vegetarians and vegans.

It’s also easy to add new businesses to the database, giving a brief description, the name and details of its whereabouts.

“The only thing we ask of people is that they give good directions,” says McKendry.

The site’s name might remind some of another expat site ― Alien’s Day Out, a blog about vegetarian and vegan options in Korea.

McKendry says she’s a fan of the site, but the choice of name was unrelated. It was partly chosen to stop the site being limited.

“I didn’t want food or restaurant in the title, I wanted it to be something that different so that if we wanted to expand it we could. We don’t have any plans to, but I just wanted to leave the option open,” she said.

“The alien just came from the foreigner thing. And the bank is just a bank of useful information.”

The Alien Bank can be found at www.thealienbank.com.

By Paul Kerry (paulkerry@heraldcorp.com)