Tap your iPhone to order food for delivery or take-out

CityMint makes ordering food for take-out or delivery an almost effortless task using your iPhone or iPod touch. CityMint has a huge database of restaurants in the San Francisco area, but will be adding more cities in the future. CityMint is a close relative to Wokozi, a food ordering service for the New York area, and both are cousins of the dot-com deadpool site, Kozmo. The biggest difference with CityMint is its mobile access optimized for iPhone, iPod touch, Palm, and BlackBerry. If you live or work in the S.F. Bay Area, you’ll want to read on to find out more about CityMint, otherwise stay tuned and we’ll let you know as more cities become available.

You would think that not enough time has passed since the WebVan and Kosmo debacle, and that internet start-ups would stay far away from the food delivery business model. But perhaps CityMint is on to something here, especially given the projected market penetration of the iPhone. Ordering food from your mobile phone is a perfect use case for this type of service. Unlike Wokozi, you don’t need a computer to find a restaurant and place an order. CityMint’s mobile interface let’s you quickly find great local eateries and place an order with just a few finger taps. And when you consider the add-on value features like ordering food via SMS, or discount coupon codes to save you money, CityMint is way ahead of its competition.

To start using CityMint, you should sign up for a free account and you need do this from your desktop computer since iPhones automatically go directly to the sign in page to start. When you sign up, you’ll need to enter your mobile phone number and carrier, then CityMint will sent your phone an activation code via SMS. Credit card information is optional, but you’ll need to enter it when you’re ready to place an order. Entering it up front on the sign up page saves you that step later.

When you sign into CityMint and tap “mobile order”, you will see a list of restaurants in your local vicinity based upon the street address used when you registered your account. You can sort the list in a variety of ways, including the option to show only those restaurants that are currently open for business. You can also sort by type of cuisine, and by which restaurants offer pickup or delivery.

Each open restaurant listed will display the name, hours of operation, and a link to a Google map. Tapping on the name of the restaurant will yield its street address, whether or not it offers pickup or delivery, what the minimum delivery amount is, and what the deliver fee is. You can also tap food items organized by category (appetizers, main courses, side dishes, desserts, etc). Tapping a food item allows you to add it to your order, add quantity, or even send special instructions for preparation (no salt, sauce on the side, etc).

You continue adding items to your order and can even add items from multiple restaurants. One single tap will submit your entire order and charge the credit card on your account. You can also save your favorite restaurants into a list for easier access from the home page. And if you find yourself ordering the same things from the same place, like pizzas for team meetings on Mondays, or bagels and coffee every Friday, then you can set up MintCodes for these repeat orders. Once a code is set up, you simply send a code via SMS to CityMint and the order is placed automatically. You can even set up orders in advance to be places on a particular date and time.

All in all, CityMint is an excellent free service to simplify food ordering for take-out or delivery. Its mobile interface is a wonderful bonus for iPhone and iPod touch owners, and should serve to build loyal, mobile customers as the service expands. Today, the service works wonderfully for San Francisco residents, and hopefully CityMint will add more cities in the near future. This is one handy service we will be using quite a bit, and would love to have it available in other locations so we can use when we’re traveling.

CityMint - Sign up for a free account
www.citymint.com