From the top, the disclaimer: I’ve known Norty Cohen for about 25 years and worked for and with him a bunch — and I think he’s a marketing genius. But I’m writing about his new site because I think it’s cool.

Rolling out today is something called Mealchime.com, basically a restaurant search site but one with built-in couponing. So say you’re looking for a place to have lunch — you type in your zip code, qualify if desired by the type of food you want, tell it how far you’re willing to drive and add a price range. What comes back is both a list of potential restaurants and a set of freebies, reduced prices and coupons applicable to restaurants in the specified area. The database appears to be pretty clean and relatively comprehensive; I did a couple of searches near home, work and neighborhoods I know and got lots of good information.

One downside I saw was that there’s no apparent ctrl-select on the restaurant types, so you can’t, for example, search “Greek/Mediterranean” and “Middle Eastern” simultaneously.

In addition to the website access, there’s also a desktop widget, although I didn’t download and play with this. Apparently there’s also a social-networking aspect where you can share your favorite restaurants with friends and invite them to join you for lunch or dinner.

I’ve peripherally worked on several restaurant-search sites, and I know the challenges of making one work well. It of course remains to be seen how well it functions in a live environment with lots of users, but so far, it looks pretty interesting.

Norty’s company is called Moosylvania (I’ve never figured out if he’s the moose or the squirrel) and it’s based in an amazing converted church in Maplewood.