How to eat well and cheaply as a student?

Many students have experienced the challenge of leaving the nest and having to provide for themselves. Most students find it particularly difficult to eat adequately, as there is no longer someone preparing meals and the tight student-budget makes regular restaurant visits unaffordable. If you’ve found yourself in this situation you should definitely continue reading. The platform “The Fork” (El Tenedor) can solve your problem.

In 2006 the founders of “LaFourcette” (French for The Fork ), Patrick and Dalsace Bertrand Jelensperger were wondering why it was still not possible to reserve tables at restaurants online. Both of the founders appreciated good living and fine foods and being internet and technology savvy geeks they decided to set up a platform allowing for online restaurant reservations. The business model was designed to benefit all parties involved.

The restaurants are provided with tools to help their everyday management by allowing the restaurants to publish offers through the platform, which helps restaurants increase demand during low-demand hours. By giving customers an overview of restaurants in a given area, the customers can easily discover restaurants and also look for beneficial deals.

The founders also created an app that covers the areas of Paris, Lyon, Lausanne, Madrid, Versailles, Brussels, Sevilla, Geneva, Nice, Monaco, Valencia, and most importantly for us Barcelona. By 2012 the platform reached 10 million bookings.

Through the platform you can decide between 19.000 restaurants, which combined has more than 2 million reviews. Both the website and the app have good filtering options, so for a certain date and time you can decide to preview only restaurants in a specific area, only restaurants of a desired cuisine, only restaurants with a minimum rating, or only restaurants with a discount - the latter is obviously the best part of the platform!

It literally allows you to search for the best restaurant offers with discounts ranging from 20% to 50%. By always booking tables at one of the discounted restaurants and filtering out anything but those offering 50% discounts you can eat out twice as often as you do now, without spending any more money. The platform also has a loyalty program, awarding the customers with 100 Yums for each booking. Some of the restaurants allow payment through Yums, so when a customer has collected 1000 Yums he or she can enjoy a 10 Euro discount, and by waiting until reaching 2500 Yums, one can enjoy a 25 Euro discount.

If you haven't used The Fork yet, you should get to it!

Check it out here.