Hack Your Life: We Tested a Bunch of Food Apps. These 12 Hold Up

Life’s three ultimate questions: What’s for breakfast? What’s for lunch? What’s for dinner? We hope you’re happy—and that these apps and websites can help with every step of feeding yourself, so you don’t have to worry about food every day.

Life comes down to eating and drinking. In the smartphone age, worrying about where your next meal will come from doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t afford one. Sometimes, in a vast city, you just don’t know where to go to soothe an angry stomach.

We broke down the steps involved in eating and tried to find a smartphone solution for each one.

Of course, no app, however useful, and no feature, however well designed, can beat coming home from work to a bowl of hot soup waiting for you alongside your mom.

A good recipe app is where it all begins. Among them, Xiachufang (iPhone | Android | website) is a little more fun and a little more thoughtful than its peers.

There are plenty of recipe apps, but quite a few are merely collections scraped from other websites. It’s hard to judge recipes gathered from across the internet: several may have the same name but different ingredients or steps. Xiachufang has a useful way around this. You can see dishes other users have made from a recipe, along with their reviews.

If a recipe doesn’t deliver what it promises or contains mistakes, users don’t just give it a low rating. They point out the problems when posting their own results, making it much easier to find a recipe you can trust.

Xiachufang has iOS and Android apps, with some thoughtful features. After finding a recipe, you can add its ingredients to a shopping list so you don’t forget anything, seasonings included. In the kitchen, turn your phone sideways to enlarge the step-by-step photos and instructions; swipe to move between steps. When your hands are covered in flour,

Xiachufang also attracts an artsy crowd. Whether you’re looking for a dish that just appeared in a Japanese drama or one from an interesting foreign cooking show, chances are you’ll find it. Then there are the community’s impossibly pretty food photos.

Good ingredients are the basis of a good dish. If you don’t care about their quality, origin or freshness, wouldn’t you be letting those good recipes down?

Benlai (iPhone, website) suits people who can’t be bothered to visit a produce market. A few taps can bring ingredients from far and wide to your door within 24 hours: fresh Qingyuan chicken, black wood-ear mushrooms from Changbai Mountain, Canadian Arctic shrimp...

The trouble with browsing Benlai is that it makes you want to buy fruit—and cook. Its photos of produce look wonderfully fresh, while prices are only slightly higher than at ordinary supermarkets and markets. It’s easy to buy more than you meant to.

In repeated tests, Benlai’s deliveries in Beijing and Guangzhou generally arrived within 24 hours. Inside the cardboard box was a foam container with cold packs to keep the ingredients cool. But we found that packages arrived only slightly cooler than room temperature—still rather warm for raw meat and seafood.

Founded two years ago, Benlai is one of China’s better online fresh-food retailers. It first drew attention on social media thanks to Chu Shijian’s Chu Orange brand. Plenty of specialist fresh-food retailers have since appeared, including Tootoo Commune, which focuses on organic farm produce, and Fruitday, which sells fruit. Overall, though, Benlai offers more variety across a wider range of prices.

Buying ingredients online isn’t always the best choice, particularly for Western dishes and baking. For one thing, the shopping list can get complicated. Main ingredients might be imported beef, pasta or cod; the rest might include cheeses, Western herbs and seasonings that an ordinary produce market simply doesn’t stock. To find everything, you may have to order some from several online retailers and Taobao, then visit an imported-goods supermarket for the rest. It’s a hassle.

Besides, most Chinese stomachs aren’t up for Western food at every meal. If you cook it only as an occasional treat, a large block of cheese might go moldy in the fridge, while the herbs wilt and dry out. Both end up in the bin. Xinwei (website) offers a partial answer to both problems.

“We pack up all the ingredients needed to cook a dish and deliver them straight to your door,” says Xinwei’s slogan. Along with the ingredients comes a detailed recipe listing what you need and explaining each step. The website also offers a downloadable PDF, handy for people who like to consult recipes on a mobile device.

Xinwei has yet to launch an app. Its website offers 21 meal kits, most for Western main courses, priced largely between 28 and 118 yuan. Register, log in, choose a dish and place an order before 5 p.m. for delivery the next day; shipping is free on orders of at least 99 yuan. Xinwei says its suppliers also serve many of Shanghai’s five-star hotels and upscale Western restaurants, and that its cold chain keeps ingredients reasonably fresh until they reach you. For now, though, it offers same-day delivery only within Shanghai’s Inner Ring and in Lujiazui.

Cooking with a Xinwei kit is a good experience. Each ingredient is portioned to match the recipe, so all you need to do is follow the steps. It feels good to finish without wasting any ingredients. As for the taste, provided you don’t burn the food, it’s unlikely to be bad. You can even recreate the fancy Western-style plating—a way to treat yourself, friends or family on a special occasion.

Xinwei’s range of Western meal kits is still fairly limited, and it offers no baking kits at all. That probably has something to do with the complexity of baking ingredients and the difficulty of keeping them fresh. Still, baking kits would be wonderful. Who wouldn’t want to escape the cycle of buying a pile of extra ingredients to use up the half-jar of cream left over from making a cake?

The ingredients are ready and the recipe is chosen. For an experienced cook, what remains is chopping, cooking and adding a little seasoning. But for someone who has barely cooked a pot of rice, even a partly prepared meal kit can feel impossible. Or perhaps you’ve come home late from work and don’t want to cook, but don’t want to settle for food delivery either. Then you need a private chef to take care of the final step at home.

iDaChu (iPhone | Android) is a location-based service for booking a chef to cook in your home. Most are professionals, and you can filter them by cuisine, years of experience or signature dishes. At 69 yuan for four dishes or 99 yuan for six, the service is fairly affordable for someone who wants to eat well without cooking. You can ask the chef to buy the ingredients—the recipes are already decided—or let them see what’s in your kitchen and make something from that.

You can book through the iOS app or its WeChat official account. For a housewarming or party that calls for a banquet, you can also discuss the meal with the chef online in advance.

One thing: the chef won’t do the washing-up. If you can’t cook, washing your own dishes afterward can at least count as a way to digest the meal.

Still don’t want to bother? Order food delivery, one dish at a time.

Ele.me (iPhone | Android) is probably the busiest food-delivery service around right now. In little more than a year, it has gone from an odd app whose flyers were handed out beneath office buildings to a service available almost everywhere in first- and second-tier cities. Its expansion clearly sped up after it raised US$25 million in a Series C round last year. Today, you’d struggle to find an uncovered spot in central Beijing or Shanghai.

Restaurants on Ele.me are generally cheap, with meals mostly costing 10 to 20 yuan per person—roughly what you’d pay for a boxed lunch. Judging by QDaily’s orders from office buildings and residential neighborhoods in Beijing and Shanghai, its chief advantages are low prices and plenty of choice.

The platform places few restrictions on sellers. Beyond fast food such as rice noodles and rice topped with meat or vegetables, you can order juice, desserts and even fruit. It’s like a Taobao for food delivery.

Rapid growth has taken a toll on the experience, though. Restaurants arrange their own deliveries, so at busy times it isn’t unusual to wait an hour before getting a call from a courier asking for directions. Don’t wait until you’re hungry to order. And once you’ve placed an order, you can’t cancel it in the app; you have to phone the restaurant.

This May, Ele.me received US$80 million in venture funding from Dianping and announced plans to add more mid-range and upscale restaurants and build its own delivery network. We haven’t yet seen the results.

If you’re tired of boxed lunches, you could have a well-reviewed restaurant deliver to your door instead.

Jinshisong calls itself a delivery service for “mid- to high-end food.” Its selection includes restaurants that don’t normally deliver.

The Jinshisong app (iPhone | website) hasn’t been around long and currently does little beyond taking orders and showing their status. Popular choices include Hatsune, Stuff’d, Putao Yuan’er, Din Tai Fung and Element Fresh—all well-known mid-range restaurants. There are also popular dessert shops, bakeries and drinks shops.

When we tried to order, we couldn’t remove dishes from the cart. After some fiddling, we placed the order on the website instead. A staff member soon called to confirm the order and invoice details, and the food arrived within the promised 60 minutes. Apart from a few bugs in the ordering interface, the process was smooth and quick.

Unlike an ordinary food-delivery order, Jinshisong staff buy the meal from the restaurant and bring it to you. That makes delivery relatively expensive: fees start at 15 yuan per order and rise with distance beyond 3 kilometers. It’s also what allows Jinshisong to deliver food from upscale restaurants.

Besides its rough-edged app, Jinshisong serves only Beijing and Shanghai for now. It was founded as far back as 2011 and is less famous than Ele.me, but it seems to be doing all right.

Perhaps next time you have a date, you could set out candles and wine glasses at home. Convenient and cozy.

Your phone can bring almost anything to your door, but going out to find a meal remains a skill modern humans need. That’s where Dianping becomes indispensable.

Few people probably love Dianping (iOS | Android | website). Its interface is hardly elegant: a portal that already feels bloated on a computer has been crammed into a phone screen.

The presentation may be poor, but the volume of information makes up for it. Inaccurate information is better than none. From dinners costing hundreds or thousands of yuan per person to a street-side shop where 5 yuan will fill you up, few restaurants now go unlisted on Dianping. Menus are often incomplete and opening hours missing, but years of reviews, photos and phone numbers still give you plenty to go on. That’s what matters.

Even its core review feature is confusing, thanks to the odd 0–4 rating system it adopted early on. So many reviewers feel the need to explain what their scores mean to them. That inevitably makes the ratings less precise: they indicate a broad trend more than a fine distinction.

For the past decade, companies have tried to challenge Dianping. Some, such as Fanben, were once popular and prettier to look at. Yet Dianping remains the best option when you need to find somewhere to eat, simply because it has the most information.

That scale also helps its group-buying service: merchants want to work with such a large point of entry. According to figures published last September by the group-buying directory Tuan800, Dianping’s group-buying service had overtaken Meituan to become the largest in first- and second-tier cities. Finding a restaurant and buying a discount voucher in the same app saves you from opening another one. For reasons both human and otherwise, though, restaurant addresses on Dianping are often wrong. Before setting out, check the location in a map app or call the restaurant.

If you want just one app for eating out, the imperfect Dianping is your best bet.

Once you’ve chosen a restaurant, you need a table. In Beijing and Shanghai, long lines can form outside restaurants of almost any standard. If you’ve found a good one, book ahead—especially for Friday night.

Dianping offers reservations, but many upscale restaurants aren’t listed. That’s when you might try DiningCity.

DiningCity organizes Restaurant Week. This upscale-dining platform has more than 25,000 member restaurants worldwide, over 350 of them in China. It says it covers more than 70% of China’s upscale restaurant market, with the vast majority of its Chinese listings in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

DiningCity has no app. You can book through its website: enter the time and number of diners, then receive confirmation by email and text message. You can also change or cancel the booking through the service.

If you book ahead rather than on the day, you’ll get a reminder on the day of your meal. There’s no need to look up the restaurant’s number and call to reserve a table. It saves time—and time, after all, is the biggest cost.

Restaurants will generally hold your table for another 15 minutes after the booked time. If you’re running late, call: some will wait longer.

Many restaurants don’t take reservations at all, though. Then you have to queue. Or let an app do it for you.

Long lines often form outside popular restaurants, particularly at mealtimes. The wait can run to hours spent standing in a crowd with nothing to do. Meiwei Buyongdeng (iPhone | Android) was made for this problem.

Open the app and you can see at a glance how busy nearby restaurants are, rather than discovering the wait only when you arrive. Green Tea, Gangli and other chains seemingly devoted to making people queue are among its partners.

As long as you aren’t too far away—say, 30 kilometers—you can choose a restaurant, take a number on your phone and enter your party size to “queue remotely.” The queue page shows your number, how many parties are ahead of you and the estimated wait. A few partner restaurants also let you order remotely.

If a restaurant doesn’t support remote queuing, you can scan a paper ticket to keep track of your place, though that doesn’t seem terribly useful. You can also link your phone number to Meiwei Buyongdeng’s WeChat official account to use its queuing service without downloading the app.

Once you’ve chosen a restaurant and waited for a table, you still have to decide what to order. The menu goes back and forth across the table to a chorus of “Whatever” and “Anything’s fine.” Or you sit staring at hundreds of dishes with no idea where to start. We can’t entirely blame friends who hate ordering; we have the same problem ourselves.

Fanqie Kuaidian (iPhone | Android) could be a gift to the indecisive. It wants to do away with those 10 minutes spent staring helplessly at a menu.

In Beijing, Fanqie Kuaidian offers menus for 8,600 restaurants and a one-tap dish-selection feature. Enter the number of diners and it suggests a combination of dishes. Don’t like it? Shake your phone for another.

At a glance, its suggestions appear to draw on dish categories and online reviews. For four people at a sushi restaurant, for example, it might suggest “3 sashimi dishes, 4 sushi dishes and 1 à la carte item.” The dishes it picks generally have good reviews.

Reportedly, staff collect some of its menus by hand; others are scraped from restaurant and food-ordering websites. Users contribute the rest by photographing them. Upload a menu Fanqie Kuaidian doesn’t have and you can earn 15 yuan.

Fanqie Kuaidian also lets users discover restaurants and share their dining experiences, in an attempt to cover everything in one app. But it still has far less information than restaurant-discovery services such as Dianping or Fanben. Its dish-selection feature isn’t connected to restaurants’ ordering systems, either. After tapping once to choose your dishes, you still have to call a waiter over and name each one.

At least you might spend a little less time agonizing over the menu next time.

After a big meal, how could you not let everyone know? Ten years ago, few would have guessed that photographing food before eating it would become so ordinary. Naturally, apps for taking and enhancing food photos followed.

Shise is a community for taking and sharing food photos. The distinctive feature of this iOS app is its customizable, poster-like text overlays. After taking a photo, you can add the dish’s name and where you ate it, all in typography that suits current tastes. Post the result to Moments, and even an ordinary plate of food seems to have a story to tell.

More interestingly, Shise’s filters are designed for different kinds of food. I tried its contrast-boosting “Rich” filter on a photo of bread; it looked much more appetizing than the real thing.

We ordered the bread pictured above through Jinshisong for afternoon tea. Pretty, isn’t it? It tasted good, too, but you probably wouldn’t have noticed it sitting in a bakery.

In a world that judges by appearances, cooking food well matters less than photographing it well—and even that matters less than retouching it well.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a little worried about all those calories. Here are some weight-loss recipe apps to act as your calorie coach.

Boohee (iPhone | Android) lets you keep a fitness diary covering both food and exercise. Its former names—“Boohee Loves Slimming,” “Foodie Weight Loss” and “Weight-Loss Food Database”—make clear whom it’s for: people who have eaten their way through this article.

The app grew out of the Boohee weight-loss community, launched in 2007. A food-nutrition database under development since 2008 forms the basis of its calorie ratings. Free users can log what they eat and the calories they burn through exercise each day; a 30-day weight-loss plan covers both diet and exercise.

Before your next meal, read how other users are getting in shape, then compare the calories in what you want to eat with what you’ve burned through exercise today. Perhaps that will keep the pounds from going in through your mouth.

An app like Boohee might spare you the guilt that follows a feast: with enough exercise, you can burn off what you ate. If you’re especially determined to curb your appetite and can stick strictly to a diet, there’s also the legendary Copenhagen diet, supposedly guaranteed to make you lose weight if you see it through. Eat three meals a day according to the app’s list, and 13 days later, you’re thin.

What did you expect? Did you think eating well was easy?!

Qiwen Cui, Jiayin Li, Xuelei Li, Yuqing Xia, Xu Tao and Junjie Huang also contributed to this article.