I can't count the amount of times that I've randomly driven down St-Jean boulevard looking for a new restaurant to try out. Yes, in the center of the West-Island of Montreal, where I have been living for 20 years already, I still haven't tried out all the restaurants.

Why not? Well it's mainly because I prefer staying with something safe instead of going for a potentially bad eating experience. I usually tell myself... "Ok, I'm going to try something new... and then after I can't find anything that seems promising, I end up going to... *gasp* Wendys.

Yes, Wendy's is a great place, but I'm really tired of it. Yes, the #4 combo is delicious, but I've had enough. Not to mention, they don't seem to be able to make the hamburger properly because everytime I un-wrap it, it falls apart. How hard is it to align the bread with the meat? Really...

So here I am, discovering new ways of finding restaurants. For starters, I began asking friends for recommendations. "Hey James, what's a good place to eat?"... that always works. But that only works a few times depending on how many close friends you have.

Anyhow, from my addiction to browsing NCIX and Ebay, I proceeded to looking up restaurant recommendation sites online. Turns out, most of them are horrible! The only one I found that actually had decent content for Montreal's West-Island was www.westislandmenus.com. I was kind of impressed at the fact that I could see the entire menus listed and have live tour of the restaurant.

So right now, I tried 4 restaurants from the site and I have to say, I liked most of them. The only one that I didn't really like was the little tiny pizza joint they have on there, but I should of figured, the virtual tour they had didn't really look that great either!

So now, I'm addicted, every week I browse the site for the newest restaurant and I plan on my Fridays around that. I pretty much know what I'm getting into without really having been there before, so I figure I'm getting the best of both worlds: A new experience without the risks of landing on a bad restaurant.