Guide to BYO-friendly restaurants

When it comes to eating out, budget-squeezed consumers are increasingly seeking out wallet-friendly alternatives to the traditional, full-service restaurant meal, as we’ve already noted in our stories about Charlie’s Burgers and Kogi Korean BBQ, to name just two. Picking up on that theme comes GoBYO, a site that aims to guide restaurant-goers to venues that will let them bring their own wine. GoBYO maintains a database of more than 17,000 restaurants that allow patrons to bring their own wines in 10 metropolitan regions of the United States. Now covering Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Southeast Florida and Washington/Baltimore, the site includes “wine-friendly ratings,” corkage fees, phone numbers, cuisines, features, price ranges, daily schedules and maps for each restaurant, as well as links to restaurant websites and reviews. (GoBYO contacts every listed restaurant frequently to confirm current data—most have been re-contacted within the past 90 days, it says.) Visitors to the site can search for a BYO-friendly restaurant by name, distance or type of cuisine as well as more than 40 other restaurant features—availability of live music or a children’s menu, for example. Results can be sorted or filtered, and links for each restaurant present Google maps and reviews on Yelp and beyond. GoBYO’s FAQ page includes a section on BYO etiquette, and for restaurants that participate in OpenTable.com, consumers can even click to reserve a table. An iPhone app is also available, as is a special carrying case that holds up to three bottles of wine. Created by the makers of DiningInfo.com—which tracks restaurants with waiter service—ad-supported GoBYO is currently free for both restaurants and users. One to partner with or emulate in a wine-loving—but markup-shy—city near you…? Spotted by: Cecilia Biemann