Most 15-year-olds are looking for summer jobs. Arya Chudiwale is launching a web platform. The rising junior at Washington-Liberty High School already has several years of restaurant experience managing La Moo Creamery, the ice cream parlor her family owns and operates in the Lee Harrison Shopping Center. Now she’s putting that insider knowledge to work, designing a crowdsourcing website called Rate The Plate that showcases Arlington restaurants.
Rate The Plate helps local eateries reach new customers while encouraging diners to expand their horizons. Visitors to the site can research Arlington restaurants and leave reviews. Restaurant owners can access insightful dashboard data. Use of the site is free for both consumers and businesses.
“I would love if small business owners would genuinely benefit from it, or they get more attraction to their stores, if we actually get a lot of people using the website and utilizing it as a tool for the Arlington community,” Chudiwale says.
Rate The Plate went live about a month ago with some 60 restaurants, including locally owned businesses such as Carbonara, Livin’ the Pie Life and Taco Bamba‘s Ballston location. At this time of this reporting, the site had 30 reviews and about 7,000 views.
How It Works
Hungry but not sure what you’re in the mood for? Rate the Plate allows users to search by location or cuisine (aka “craving”). Search “Italian” or “pizza,” for example, and you’ll see restaurants on a map with addresses, thumbnail photos and each one’s star rating, based on Rate the Plate reviews.
Clicking on “View Details” opens a page with more specifics about a given restaurant. For example, the page for La Côte d’Or Café has two reviews and info on a three-course dinner experience for $40-$65.
A Decision Helper feature allows diners to compare two restaurants side-by-side. To leave a review, site visitors must create a free login.
On the business side, Chudiwale provides restaurant owners and managers with a code to set up a free account and access data. That part has been slow-going: Of the 40 restaurants she’s contacted via email, only about 5% have responded, she says.
“When restaurants log in using the code we provide, they can download a spreadsheet containing all usernames and reviews left on their store,” she says. “The dashboard also lets them filter by date or custom range, and see the average rating, rating trend and review volume over time. They can also view a rating distribution breakdown, sentiment analysis and cuisine context.”
Big Ideas for Small Businesses
Chudiwale came up with the idea for Rate the Plate while managing La Moo Creamery, a Thai rolled ice cream shop that her family bought two years ago.
“My father grew up in a small village in India, where he and his dad ran a small clothing store together,” she says. “When he moved to America, he always hoped to carry on that legacy and build something our whole family could run together. We found La Moo Creamery and felt it was the perfect fit.”
Immersion in the family business allowed Chudiwale to learn the ins and outs of hiring, training, inventory management, flavor invention and catering.
With Duck Donuts next door and Cold Stone Creamery less than a mile away, she’s also learned how hard it is for mom-and-pops to compete with the big chains. She created the site, in part, to help small businesses that can’t afford an advertising budget. She hopes it brings awareness to the many independently owned eateries that give Arlington County its flavor.
From Cones to Code
Chudiwale built the site from scratch, using HTML and JavaScript. Her friend, William Petty, a rising sophomore at Washington-Liberty, helped refine the user interface. Now she’s watching to see how people use it.
“I was thinking about expanding the website so that you can filter by ZIP code,” she says. “Successful to me is just people using it as much as possible.”
In late June, she’ll present the website at the Future Business Leaders of America National Leadership Conference in San Antonio, Texas, competing in the Website Coding and Development category. The top three winners will receive cash prizes.
As for that summer job? She has one of those, too. She is a camp instructor at Boolean Girl, an Arlington nonprofit focused on coding.
