My motivation for creating this site:
The Austin Chronicle Food Section seemed to lack useful info for the places I looked up near work. A couple of obvious searches turned up either odd results (La Morada) or information-free results (Chuy's).
Austin360 seems mostly focused on high-end dinner places, fancy-pants chefs, etc. And the restaurant section is almost nothing more than a yellow pages with lots of ads--odds are if you search for a smaller restaurant, you will be presented with an almost useless slow-loading page of non-information (e.g., La Morada). Update: they just recently (as of 1/2006) redesigned the site. Much nicer now, but still heavy on the ads and distractions.
Citysearch Austin is actually not too bad compared to others, but is just so heavily laden with ads and extra crap, not to mention layer upon layer of tables and divs, that it's not very pleasant to navigate. The site does have some pictures, which is a plus, and also seems to get a fair number of user reviews, also a plus. And they fared the best of all these sites on the "La Morada Test." But as mentioned, overall, the site is a bit too noisy (the La Morada page weighs in at 41 tables and 67 divs as of this writing). Another interesting note about their site: they use funky fake URLs. For example, the URL for their Tacodeli review page is http://austin.citysearch.com/profile/34438374/austin_tx/tacodeli.html. The stuff after the restaurant id (I presume), 34438374, is all just tacked on junk that is designed to make it look like their URLs have some human-readable relation to the subject of the page (which is silly since the URLs still have the numeric ID portion--why bother?). So this URL takes you to the same place: http://austin.citysearch.com/profile/34438374/, as does this one: http://austin.citysearch.com/profile/35497779/put/whatever/you/want/here.html.
Dining Out with Rob Balon seems pretty good, but it does not offer the format that would be most useful to me. He does have several reviews of restaurants I might actually eat at, but the site is more of an "Austin food scene" site from what I can tell. Definitely worth a visit though. (Rob does not pass the La Morada Test). The site also features a candidate for the Largest Web Page in Austin award--the Food and Wine News page, currently weighing in at 308k of text and over 3 megabytes of images (the page includes a whopping 63 images)! Load time was 53.79 seconds my last visit, according to Fasterfox.
About.com's Austin Restaurants is just a mess. Anyone familiar with the about.com site knows it is a jumble of noisy ads and pop-ups, with some difficult to discern content mixed in somewhere. I think there are some decent reviews in there, and even a few photos, but it's too hard to navigate to put much effort into. They also fail the La Morada Test as of this writing.
Epinion.com's Austin Restaurants contains some decent reviews, but there is no organization to the listings--it's just a list of reviews ordered chronologically. No sign of La Morada.
You will also notice that I don't have very sophisticated taste in grub. I like tex-mex, hamburgers and sandwiches, in that order. Don't expect too many visits to exotic locales--you won't find phrases such as "habanero-orange vinaigrette" or hear mention of "a salad of sliced grapes, candied kumquats and herbs" at auslunch.com.