So your dining-out budget is tight and you need to make sure your choices are well-made. There's an app for that—and it's free.

What Chefs Eat is an iPhone application developed by icanhascheezburger.com and ihasahotdog.com co-creator Eric Nakagawa and longtime food-media maven Melanie Kosaka.

The app touts eatery choices “;from only-in-Hawaii favorites to the best spots for ramen and late-night eats ... the places and foods savored by Hawaii's best palates,”; according to its home page online.

The app contains recommendations from D.K. Kodama, Alan Wong, Roy Yamaguchi and Nalo Farms and Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation President Dean Okimoto, to name a few.

It also offers chances to win a trip to Hawaii on Hawaiian Airlines and a gourmet tour, to users who send “;tweets”; from What Chefs Eat on Twitter.com, Kosaka said.

Restaurateur and master sommelier Chuck Furuya planted the seed with her about six months ago, she said. He suggested she create a Web site on “;where the chefs hang out after hours,”; she recalled him saying.

Everybody knows about Colin Nishida's Side Street Inn, but surely there are other places, right?

Like a saucier full of brown gravy, the idea got put on the back-burner—until Kosaka and Nakagawa met at an event in San Francisco that brought together entrepreneurs and Internet and venture capital companies.

They decided the chef-hang site would work better as a mobile phone application.

“;We connected in November and the app was in the iPhone store Feb. 22nd,”; she said.

“;I like building technology things, and the app we built together touches back to Hawaii,”; said Nakagawa, now based in Los Angeles. It was developed under a company named after a Hawaiian word for bridge, Uapo LLC. The app is powered by ADAM Inc., Nakagawa's startup. He is working on a version of What Chefs Eat for the Android phone.

“;I think there's a way, if tech can work together with tourism, to drive traffic to small businesses,”; he said.

Dozens of Web sites offer user-generated restaurant reviews, but Kosaka's goal was “;to go for quality of information rather than quantity of information,”; and get recommendations from the professional palates of chefs.

Rather than have 100 entries for Japanese food, maybe What Chefs Eat will have 20 “;great ones,”; which will also make the application easier to update with specials and promotions, she said.