As Mario Gomez-Hall introduces me to his new restaurant discovery app, Zest Maps, the founder dwells on his user rankings and highlights a profile at the top of the rankings with more than 1,000 logged visits. He is the co-founder of Foursquare Dennis Crowleyhelping to beta test.
“He gave us very helpful feedback,” says Gomez-Hall. “It’s sort of a spiritual successor to Foursquare.” (For those who may not remember, Foursquare was a popular platform. location checker social app around 2010, when GPS-enabled apps first appeared.)
The essentials of Zest Cardsdeployed today for iOS users (no Android support yet), is automatic logging of every restaurant and cafe you visit by tracking your credit card swipes and use your data to highlight other dining spots you might enjoy. The app AI tools analyze your dining history and create a map of nearby recommendations with photos and descriptions of each place’s vibe.
Courtesy of Zest
Zest also aggregates this user data to report emerging restaurants in your area, as well as new places your friends are visiting. “We only show the first visit to a place,” he explains. “So if you keep coming back to the same pizzeria, we won’t spam your friends with the same pizzeria.” Visits to chain restaurants are also not often highlighted on Zest. The app pays more attention to your date night at the Brazilian steakhouse than to some after-work McDouble.
Gomez-Hall knows some users will be hesitant to link their cards, emphasizing that this feature is optional and made easier by Plaida popular platform that connects fintech apps to your bank; Services like Google Wallet and Wealthfront use Plaid. “We don’t see your OnlyFans,” he says. “We only look at food and drink.” In addition to only analyzing restaurant transactions, Zest allows users to control who can see their visits as friends and remove any restaurant visits.
The founder’s profile breaks down his 966 logged visits into the five main categories: coffee, bakery, Thai, pizza and Japanese. His profile shows Delicious Thai Kitchen and Ike’s Love & Sandwiches in Oakland as a few of his go-to places, along with saved lists of restaurants he wants to visit, nearby or on vacation. Every time a friend goes to a location you’ve saved, it’s likely highlighted on your Zest Map.
Its aspirations with Zest are focused, seeking to complement the apps people currently use rather than trying to displace established players. “A niche network is perhaps even more valuable, in many ways, because you have a very targeted user base,” he says. “We don’t really want to try to be this all-purpose app that beats Google and Yelp. We want to be the thing on food discovery and tracking.
Gomez-Hall sees young adults in large urban centers, where dining options are more abundant, as her core user base, as well as people who want more personalized food recommendations when they journey.
In April, I wrote why you should think twice before sharing financial information with AI tools like ChatGPT, which remains true. But I was surprised by how much I liked the idea of Zest. The app’s value proposition will be too invasive for those who want to maintain a tighter sense of privacy over their data, and it won’t inherently be as useful for people living in more rural areas where dining options are more limited and busier.
Courtesy of Zest
Courtesy of Zest
My partner and I constantly discuss our need to visit a wider variety of places to dine in our San Francisco neighborhood. Automatically seeing all the sushi counters and taco shops we’ve ever visited, with recommendations on next steps, seems to spare us our standard 30-minute deliberation period of scrolling through multiple apps and online reviews.
Plus, I’d like to have more information about where my friends actually dine out, beyond their blurry Instagram stories. My inner voyeur wants to know where you actually went to eat during this week-long Tokyo getaway, because I need recommendations for my next trip. (I’m also just curious.)
The social location-sharing aspect of Foursquare was extremely popular when it first came out more than a decade ago, but since then the novelty of GPS-based apps has worn off. Today, many users are more and more sensitive on how their location data East to be shared. If the app can maintain a sense of trust with users who choose to share their information, Zest Maps could be an important successor to Foursquare, reviving social food recommendations and providing choices tailored to what you really want to eat.
