In the great food-loving town that is Louisville, deciding where to eat can be a challenge, even before you open a single menu. Michelle Jones, who created the Consuming Louisville website in 2007, felt the burden of having so much information spread across too many places. “I was frustrated with the experience of trying to find information quickly on my phone,” says Jones. “If someone else had built an app to do that, I would have been happy to pay $2.99 and be on my way. But if no one else was going to do it, I figured I’d have to.”

The resulting iPhone application, Menu and Hours, hit the iTunes Store last month, soon making the top five on the Food and Drink best seller list alongside such mainstays as Food Network and Allrecipes.com. But Jones’ success was not without some pre-ordering deliberation; first, she surveyed her readers on Consuming Louisville (tag line: “Savoring every bite of the River City”) to find out exactly what people wanted. “‘Menus’ and ‘hours’ were what people wanted, and that fueled the path that I went down,” says Jones.

Then there was the issue of serving up what people were ordering. “I started meeting with developers and getting an idea of the cost in November, but I wanted to be sure there was a market,” she says. She raised $6,400 – about a third of the app’s final cost – on the fundraising site Kickstarter.com. “That was the amount that I thought, ‘Okay, if I can raise this, there’s a need and people want it.’”

Bridging the financial gap herself, Jones tapped local developer Jeff Jackson to program the data she gathered, including menus, hours, contact information and locations for each independent restaurant in the Metro Louisville area. “It is as simple as the name,” she says. “You find what you want to know – what to eat, when they’re open, where they’re located.”

In the beginning, Jones gingerly approached a handful of her favorite haunts. (“If they had said no, I’d have been really depressed,” she says.) But her fears proved unfounded. “I was able to go to a lot of restaurant owners personally and say, ‘This is what I’m working on,’ and they would give me their menus and I’d enter them into the database.” At press time, Menu and Hours was a couple of establishments away from the century mark – not counting multiple locations – and, given the scope of metro Louisville, “the sky’s the limit.”

Menu and Hours is “simple, clean, beautiful and easy to use, which is what I look for in an app,” Jones says. “I don’t need an app that adds to my frustration; I want one that removes my frustration.” Pending sufficient income from the iPhone version, Jones expects an Android version by the end of 2012.

Between keeping Consuming Louisville and Menu and Hours updated, the Highlands resident does have to eat. “For straight-up comfort food, or if I’ve had a really bad day, I like to sit in the bar at the Irish Rover and have fish and chips. Another favorite is Havana Rumba. And then for a nice dinner, I like to go to the Mayan Cafe.” Because, after all, sometimes you just have to unplug and focus on what’s on your plate at the moment.

Menu and Hours retails on the iTunes App Store for $2.99.

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