There are over one million restaurants in America.

Almost 7,000 in Wash DC, 4,397 in Philadelphia, 4000 in Denver, 5,953 in Chicago, 8,150 in LAyou get the idea. There are a lot of places to eat in every city. In San Francisco alone, are more than 3,000. So let's say youre someone who likes going out to eat at restaurants & bars.

And let's say you have a lifestyle that enables you to not only go out every weekend - but to also go out one night a week as well.

Now imagine keeping up that routine every single week of the year - never taking a week off to relax or just stay-in or to catch a cold, celebrate a holiday at home or anything. A schedule that would be almost impossible for even the most motivated foodie.

But if you were to do the math (I'm not very good at math so I'm using a calculator.) you could see just how long it would take to hit all the restaurants in your town.

In mine, going out 3 nights a week x 52 weeks a year, I could sample 156 local restaurants each year. An impressive number but only a fraction of the ones out there.

In a city like mine, that has roughly 3,000 restaurants, you'd divide 3,000 restaurants by 156 restaurant visits/year to come up with a grand total of 19.23 years needed to hit them all.

That's over nineteen years! Throw in a couple of sick days and youre at an even twenty. Which means, I need to either roll the dice and see what serendipity has in store for me or hope that my tastes are identical to those of our local food critics and magazine editors.

But if you're like me, and your taste doesn't always follow the mainstream's - you probably have a favorite restaurant or twoor maybe even ten that aren't on the annual local Best Restaurants list. So, unless you make a 20 year commitment to try every restaurant in the cityand have an unlimited budget, you're probably going to miss out on a few that you'd love.

That's where Course Restaurant Guide comes in. Course is the time and disappointment-saving restaurant recommendation app that is the result of a five year-long project from Philadelphia based Hawser LLC.

It's a new kind of restaurant rating and recommendation platform that primarily distinguishes itself from existing platforms like Yelp and OpenTable by using private reviews instead of public ones and by giving it's members a more personal approach to restaurant recommendations. How personal you might ask? Course let's you create what they call a "Personal Taste Profile" and once their A.I. engine learns what you like and what you don't (and why) it uses that information to calculate your own unique personal compatibility with restaurants & bars so that the odds youll love the next restaurant you try are exponentially higher.

They have a Spotify-like list making tool for avid bucket list makers too.

Course just announced on their facebook page that theyre pivoting from their original subscription-based approach to now being a free service that they plan to monetize with "unobtrusive yet relevant ads and in-app purchases that are consistent with the food-lover lifestyle".

Josh Sapienza, Founder and Managing Partner of Hawser explains the motivation behind Course on the website: "Independent restaurants make up the very fabric of every vibrant community and need our support now more than ever, but trying a new restaurant and being disappointed can quickly make people lose interest in 'rolling the dice'."

Course Restaurant Guide is available in the App Store, On Google's Play Store and as a web app.

Click here for further information