A new startup aims to reinvent how people discover their next favorite place to dine and, one day, perhaps more. Zest, a newly launched restaurant discovery app, uses a combination of transaction data and AI to make personalized restaurant recommendations based on where people actually go to eat, drink, or grab a coffee.
Founded in November 2024, Zest currently has $1.8 million in pre-seed funding from Alexis Ohanian at 776 and Steve Jang at Kindred Ventures. It has been in beta testing since nearly day one, expanding from friends and family to larger groups over time.
Now, the app has launched to the public, allowing anyone to track their dining outings and get recommendations. In a matter of weeks, Zest has attracted over 100,000 visits post-launch and is growing.
While a number of apps allow people to make dining wishlists or curate favorite spots, Zest’s advantage is that its recommendations are based on real-world data. To use Zest, you’ll link your credit card to the app, and it will import all the restaurants you’ve visited to create a personal dining map that others can follow. (It doesn’t track fast-casual or fast food, to reduce the clutter.)
As the app learns where you dine and what you like, it gets smarter, making personalized recommendations of what to try next. You can also follow friends or creator-curated profiles to get other suggestions of where to eat, either in your own city or when traveling, if you choose.
Your credit card data is imported into Zest via the financial services company Plaid, trusted by banks and other fintech and budgeting apps. This allows the app to access your credit card transactions, import only those in the food and drink categories for its map, and ditch the rest.
The idea is not as crazy as it seems. Venmo also leverages people’s desire to share where they shop and dine with others, turning spending into a social network of sorts. And in an earlier era of the web, a startup called Blippy infamously tried to turn a feed of your purchases into a recommendation network of sorts.
Where Blippy and others like it went wrong is that they stopped at data-sharing alone, instead of building a network based on the data that improved their understanding of user interests over time. In addition, they were likely too early, as consumer sentiment towards data-sharing has improved over time, as they saw where it could add value in services like Apple’s Find My Friends, Snap Map, and others.
“Our approach with Zest, by doing it via verified dining spend, we actually think that we surface more places that are actually interesting. Instead of it being about social posturing and sharing that you went to this Michelin star restaurant or that,” explains Zest co-founder Mario Gomez-Hall, who was previously Head of Design at the social calendaring app Saturn, which exited to Snap last year. (Zest’s technical co-founder Alex Moller, meanwhile, brings his experience at Apple and other tech companies to the new venture.)
“It’s actually more about your regulars and the spots that are the ‘hole in the wall’ — the burrito spot that you love and is dependable,” Gomez-Hall continues. “And we surface that because we see the frequency and the spend.”
The idea behind Zest builds on his understanding of how social networks based on curation work, which Gomez-Hall learned from his prior startup, Cymbal, focused on music. Both companies were trying to connect people who have similar tastes, even if those people are not your real-world friends.
“With Zest, there’s a limited set of restaurants in any city. I’m lucky enough that I live in an area with tons of restaurants and new places opening,” he says, referring to the San Francisco Bay area, where he’s now based after graduating from Tufts University in Boston. “But if you are in a smaller town, there might be fewer. So it’s really all about curation and finding the neighborhood haunts, the hidden gems.”
In addition to recommendations, Zest leverages over 80 million reviews pulled from various sources across the web to enhance its suggestions and understanding of the places people save. Gomez-Hall says the list includes everything from high-end sources, like the Michelin dining guide, to sort of “man-on-the-street” recommendations, like the kind of thing you’d see on Reddit.
This month, Zest is launching a new feature that will let anyone write something in a freeform note about a place, like how to get a reservation, what dish to order, or other general thoughts. It’s also poised to launch a “Fresh Picks” feature that will work something like Spotify’s Discovery Weekly playlist, but for new restaurants to try throughout your city.
Over time, the team at Zest wants to expand beyond restaurants to curate other types of city hot spots.
“When we named the company, we named it Zest because it was a nod to food, but it wasn’t 100% food. It’s like a ‘zest for life,’ exploration, and I think longer-term, we could totally see a world where we add shopping,” notes Gomez-Hall.
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