A Once Niche Food App Is Now a Social Place for Gen Z
Beli might just be overshadowing Yelp.
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As a Gen Z food writer living in New York City, dining out sometimes feels like a game. Social media has added an element of competition for those who choose to play along. TikTok-viral restaurants can boast lines down the block; snagging a coveted reservation is nearly as cutthroat as getting tickets to the Eras Tour. (Ask anyone who’s done both, and they’ll tell you about all the alarms they set.)
There’s no winning this game, but you can brag to your friends about the imaginary points you won by trying that cool new restaurant or cocktail bar.
Beli, an app for personally ranking every restaurant, bar, café and bakery you visit, is where we keep score.
The app functions very similarly to Goodreads or Letterboxd. You log the food spots you try and can add optional tags, photos and notes. Unlike other reviewing platforms, though, you don’t directly rate a Beli entry. The app asks you to compare new entries to the others on your list, then it crunches the numbers and assigns it a value out of ten. It offers recommendations based on your rankings, too, as it collects information about your tastes.
The downside of this system is that you have to compare eateries of every cuisine and price point with each other — a Michelin-starred restaurant, a food truck, a hole in the wall. It’s famously hard to compare apples to oranges, so the results may feel skewed, but you can override them if you want. While imperfect, it’s a cool and mostly functional concept.
Co-founders and couple Judy Thelen and Eliot Frost designed Beli to streamline their own restaurant-reviewing system. They used to manually color-code and rank every restaurant they tried in Google Maps but figured there must be a better way. So they started building Beli together while attending Harvard Business School.
The app launched in 2021, but it’s only truly been hitting its stride in recent months. There are users all over the world, though the app is most popular in New York City and Chicago. Beli’s official TikTok and Instagram accounts have amassed roughly half a million followers apiece, but according to the founders, the app’s user base greatly surpasses that number. Users logged 13 million reviews in 2023, 30 million in 2024 and over 25 million so far this year. (For comparison, Yelp users posted 22 million reviews in 2023 and 21 million in 2024).
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Why such dramatic growth? It may have something to do with its success on college campuses. The Beli team enlisted students as beta testers and interns. Food lovers at the University of Chicago, New York University and Brown University were evangelizing about the app by 2023 (the same year the Subreddit r/beliapp was established). The platform also incorporated features that ingrained it in campus social life, such as the option to link a student ID to an account and compete on a school’s leaderboard.
Beli even crept into modern dating. People began sharing their rankings on dating apps to brag about their good taste or vet potential partners.
All of this attracted a young, loyal user base that decided Beli was cool and popularized it through word of mouth. Thelen and Frost say 80 percent of users today are under age 35 and join the app through referrals. Now, it’s reaching a cultural tipping point where it suddenly feels like everyone is on Beli.
I, too, downloaded Beli in 2023 because a college friend suggested it. Today, I use it mainly to keep a list of restaurant recommendations handy and to browse what’s popular, but others prioritize the social aspects of it. You can’t message on the app, but you can follow people and see their updates in your feed.
“It’s my new form of social media,” Chicago-based TikToker Maddy Kim says in a 2023 video. “It’s basically like Yelp for young people, I guess, and super cool. I just love to stalk my friends and see where they’re going.”
Beli’s most prolific and influential reviewer, who goes by Gary’s Diner, has logged over seven thousand restaurants and is ranked number one among all users.
“I downloaded Beli in August of 2022 & it’s honestly been a life-changing app & has connected me to restaurants I would have never even heard of,” Gary’s Diner captions a recent Instagram post. “Beli offers an extensive network of people who are equally obsessed with food & many who have an in-depth understanding of the industry. Through Beli I’ve met chefs, critics, influencers, pop-up owners home bakers.”
A New York-based Beli user named Allegra has reviewed over one thousand places on the app and is now taking her enthusiasm to the streets. She now finds other Beli users in the wild and asks them to compare popular restaurants for TikTok.
And Beli is becoming even more social. Last week, it announced the ability to bookmark places directly from Instagram and TikTok posts, putting them right into your “Want to Try” list. Its reach seems poised to grow even more.
I just ranked my 200th restaurant on Beli. I try not to get too caught up in the game of it all — sometimes I catch myself drafting my review in my head towards the end of a meal. But I admit, the game can be really fun, and Beli keeps making it easier and easier to play.
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