Spent the last few months building a road trip food discovery app — finally launched it

I'm a foodie based in Sacramento and I kept running into the same problem every time I drove somewhere. Google Maps only shows you restaurants at the start and end of your route. If you want food in between you have to scroll the map manually, search city by city, filter by one cuisine type at a time. It's a lot of work.

I thought about it for about a year before I actually started building. The idea was simple — enter your start and destination, see every restaurant along the entire route at once. Turns out "simple idea" and "simple to build" are very different things.

The tricky parts:

- Getting real driving route geometry (not straight lines) and sampling it into search waypoints without blowing through API rate limits

- Building a ranking system that doesn't just surface the most-reviewed places — a 4.3★ with 1,400 real reviews should beat a 4.8★ with 9 reviews

- Filtering results that are actually along the route vs just nearby the start or end point

- Lots of iteration on the filters, a few deployment failures, the usual

It's called RouteBites. There's a Food mode, a Drinks & Desserts mode, and a Both mode. Hidden Gems filter is my favorite feature.

routebites-rouge.vercel.app — free, no account needed

Genuinely open to feedback on what's broken or can be changed — it's still early.