This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s spring editorial intern Kelly Xiong. Find her on Instagram at @k.3lly. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
Have you ever wanted to go out to eat but don’t know where? Maybe you couldn’t quite recall which places you enjoyed eating at versus the ones that you didn’t quite like. Or maybe you want to try something new but don’t know where to look. If you love food and trying new things, check out the Beli app. And if you’re a foodie, this app might just be your new holy grail.
What is Beli?
Beli is an app that lets you rate all the food places you’ve been to. It then organizes them into a list sorted from highest ranked to lowest. There are five categories that one can fall under — restaurant, bar, bakery, coffee and tea, and ice cream and dessert. That way, you’ll always have an idea of what places you liked and disliked. You can also add pictures of things you’ve ordered to the restaurant page. This can help you and others decide on what to order off the menu. And if you’re a “phone eats first” person like I am, this will be like second nature.
Beli will also give you personalized recommendations based on what types of cuisine you tend to like. For example, if you tend to rate Asian cuisines highly and that’s where you usually go, Beli will try to recommend more restaurants that fall under that category. This doesn’t mean that suddenly all your personalized recommendations will be just Asian cuisine though.
The point of the app is to try to expand your horizons while also keeping an organized list of everywhere you’ve been to. If you’re somewhere who only likes going to the same couple of places, Beli can help you find other places to try that. Who knows? You might end up having a new favorite place.
Other Beli features
The fun thing about Beli is that it is not only an app to track and rank where you’ve been. It’s also kind of a social app. You can also add friends on there and see where they’ve been, what they like or dislike and your “compatibility” with that person and the places they’re going to. The “compatibility” component means that based on what you tend to like and what your friends tend to like, Beli will predict how similar your food palette is. Based on that similarity or difference, they can predict if you’ll like or dislike a food place that your friends have been to and rated. This isn’t an exact science, but it does kind of give you an idea of what you might expect.
Another fun feature about Beli is that you can also bookmark places you want to try. That way, you won’t ever forget about it. The app also gives you a map view option of the ranked and bookmarked places. If you’re a visual person like me, this will be very helpful. You’re able to see where and how far places are from you. This can be useful when planning a date or any other occasion.
Beli’s social and organizational features tie in together super well. You can comment on your friends’ ratings of places and also tag them in the places you’ve rated if you went together. The social aspects of the app are so subtle that even if you don’t have friends on this app, you’ll still have a great time using it.
My Beli review
I’ve had a great time using Beli. It led me to discover a lot of new and amazing restaurants. As someone who travels from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles and New York often, finding new things to try can be difficult. In big cities such as these, the number of options can be overwhelming. Beli’s Instagram is a great source of ideas — especially for NYC. Since the creators of the app are from New York and it’s still a fairly new app, that will be where most of their featured places are.
I can also attest that you don’t need friends on the app to enjoy using it. I only have three friends on the app, and they don’t even use it all that frequently. Sure it’s fun to see what they’re up to and where they’ve been but if anything, I use the app for me. I like to keep track of the food places I like and dislike, what I like from those places and sometimes, I like to see my nearby recommendations. It’s also fun to compare my ratings to my boyfriend’s sometimes.
My Beli review is most definitely super positive and I would highly recommend trying this app out if you’re a big foodie and like to try new things. The cool thing about Beli is that they also do their own version of Spotify wrapped but for food. It’ll tell you things like where you’ve been the most, your top five cuisines and what city you tend to eat in the most. It’s just a cool little feature to know more about myself. Another cool thing is that they started doing something of a New Year’s resolution goal. They call it the “2024 restaurant challenge”. My 2024 challenge is to try 50 new restaurants this year. I’ve seen some people go as high as 200 new restaurants this year — but they also live in New York so that actually won’t be as hard as it seems.
Let us know in the comments below if you have tried Beli and what your 2024 restaurant challenge goal is.
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