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Following a glowing review of a new Thai restaurant in my neighborhood in Wednesday's New York Times, I decided to try ordering in for dinner last night. The trouble was that I only half-remembered the restaurant's name. My plan was to look up the Times review, plug the name into MenuPages and figure out what to order. As luck would have it, however, the Internet connection in my apartment went down right at dinnertime and the soonest a technician could be dispatched was next Tuesday (thank you Time Warner). Calling information was out of the question because a) I have VoIP at home (which wouldn't work because the non-functioning Internet connection), and b) I still didn't know the restaurant's name.

On to Plan B, which entailed trying to follow the same path, only on my mobile device, a BlackBerry Curve. Getting to nytimes.com presented no problem, but the fact that BlackBerry defaults to the Times' mobile site did, because the mobile site doesn't appear to index all of the content from nytimes.com (or if it does, I couldn't find it). After 10 minutes of fruitless browsing in search of the Dining section, I switched gears and fired up the Opera Mini browser, which does provide access to the same nytimes.com site you get on your PC, and found the name pretty quickly.

Next stop: MenuPages. An added twist was that the restaurant had a hyphenated name, and MenuPages requires an exact match in order to pull up results. That added several more minutes of frustration. Finally, I was able to pull it up but neither the JavaScript pop-up menu nor the downloadable PDF version would work on either mobile browser. A half an hour into this ordeal and watching as the clock ticked past nine, I gave up and dialed the restaurant, planning to just wing my order based on a few dishes mentioned in the review. By the time I got through, they were no longer doing delivery, so overwhelmed were they by the volume of diners streaming in because of the mention in the Times.

Bottom line: mobile search, whether through the engines or on content sites, still leaves something to be desired. It works relatively well when you know exactly what you want, but it falls short when a hungry diner like I was last night knows what he doesn't know and what he needs to find out. In retrospect, I should have plugged "thai restaurant" and the zip code into Google and found the restaurant that way, but I was stuck on re-reading the review and getting a sense of what to order. Next time, I'll know better.