Seattle's Most Useful Food Blog

There are more restaurants in the International District than I can count, and without relying on recommendations, it's hard to get a sense of which ones are worth eating at and which ones I should never enter.

Which is why MSG150 is brilliant. A group of what I'm guessing are coworkers, led by the blog's founders, Adam, Emmett, and Geary, are systematically prowling a 16-block stretch of the International District, lunching, reporting, rating, and photographing. Their rules include:

1. We will eat at all establishments whose primary source of income is food. This excludes coffee shops, total dive bars, and scary marts, but everything else is on the list.

4. We will eat at restaurants in a predetermined order. However, if the next restaurant cannot accommodate us when we show up, we will skip it for that day and come back to it on the next outing.

6. No jokes about being hungry again at 3 pm, unless you are offering to buy snacks.

So far, the group numbers up to 11 people, and every diner reports on his or her experience. MSG150 has the two qualities required of a truly useful blog: It is thorough, as well as fearless.

The site can be a bit unwieldy with so many reviews and pictures, and so far it's not searchable by name but by month and by rating -- 1 to 5 chopsticks; so far Jade Garden has scored the highest rating at 4.6. However, you can search for the restaurant by name at urbanspoon.com, and if MSG150 has written about the place it will appear in the "Blog Posts about X" section.

I am now a devoted follower.