When Evernote Food for Android was released last year, I had my, shall we say, doubts, about its real usefulness. Today's update to the app has significantly reduced them. Evernote Food has gone from being a tool to record your homemade recipes and restaurant eating endeavors into a food exploration experience.

Which is to say, now you can browse recipes from a large repository of popular sites, and look up restaurants. Of course, these features wouldn't be complete without a heaping helping of Evernote-infused awesomness. You can tag restaurants as "saved" (oddly, it doesn't seem you can un-save them), so you know you've been there, or want to go. You can even the see menus for some establishments. The restaurant data is powered by Foursquare, and you can make bookings via OpenTable for select locations straight from the app.

The real treat for me is the new recipe exploration option. You can search massive recipe indexes from an impressive number of popular sites (Epicurious, Martha Stewart, Weelicious, AllRecipes, Food Republic, Chow, Serious Eats - just to name a few), with big, beautiful images of each dish. Recipes load as rendered webpages (I've never seen an app that can reliably scrape a recipe), but you can save these recipe cards to your "cookbook" for later reference. I'm already sold. And this is just a snippet - the whole app has been redesigned, and there are even more new features you can read about at Evernote's blog.

Head to Google Play to get the update now.