Founded Jan. 25, 2010, Dining Out In Central Mass has been delighting readers and restaurants alike with an open forum of positive cuisine discussion. Mike Cooley began this Face Book page with the intent to not only inspire diners to "keep it local" but to boost to the struggling economy with restaurants in his area.
We had visited a few restaurants one evening and I noticed that none of them were doing a “Booming” dinner hour and I thought something needs to change, our area needs some positive spin on our restaurants and pubs, so Mike decided to take action.

A tough economy inevitably leads to failed businesses. It's a sad fact that no one likes to see. The thought was maybe a little bit of free advertising through positive conversation amongst my friend list would give local businesses a little boost.  I was home one evening and thought that a Web page that would promote locally owned places equally with an opportunity for their customers to pass along positive feedback may be an answer, and Dining Out In Central Mass was created on Face Book.

Once I created the page I added a few of the local restaurants that I would frequent and left some positive comments about them, the following morning there were over 100 people that had “Liked” the page overnight. The concept of the page is simple, share with us your favorite restaurants or pubs, your experience, a favorite server or special event, all we ask is to keep it positive, there are plenty of places to go to give a bad review, we are trying to promote business. Mike told OTS that people agree on the concept and about keeping comments nice, with over 4300 people on the page that he has only had to delete 1 person that just found the need to bash everyone.

Now with close to 5000 members I feel we are covering more ground, more restaurants and more diners than I ever imagined. DOICM has now developed a web page in addition to the Face Book page at www.doicm.com

This page will host reviews from locally owned restaurants in Allison’s Corner and from the Restaurant Rover. With the webpage we have the opportunity to provide money saving coupons to area restaurants that are exclusive to the visitors of the web page. We currently have close to 60 restaurants that post on the Face Book page with some frequency and more are welcome, any restaurant or pub is welcome to post on the page, all we ask is to keep the post “Food” related, we do not promote bands or fund raisers. The wonderful people in the industry I have met through this experience has inspired me to try to become more directly involved and I am currently shopping businesses locally. Stay tuned Massachusetts diners!!