Sofia Jain has a carefully considered process for reviewing restaurants. She dines out in Manhattan, where she lives, constantly. She takes notes on the service, ambience and food. And she deliberates for several hours before scoring a meal from one to 10.
“I try to avoid recency bias,” she said.
Ms. Jain, 28, is not a restaurant critic. She is a prolific reviewer on Beli, a social restaurant app that allows users to rate meals, creates lists, interact with fellow diners and amass points on a leaderboard. Since signing up in 2022, she has reviewed more than 1,700 restaurants and has another thousand or so bookmarked.
Beli has steadily attracted younger diners since its release in 2021, convincing many of them to start rating restaurants for the first time. The company says roughly 80 percent of its users are under the age of 35.
On Yelp, the most prominent reviewing platform of the last two decades, only 24 percent of U.S. users are between the ages of 18 and 34, according to a Yelp spokeswoman.
“No one in my generation writes on Yelp,” Ms. Jain said.
Members of Gen Z visit more restaurants more frequently than any other age group, and many of them are scoring their experiences and planning their next meal on Beli. The app, which first gained popularity in New York, can be used to rate restaurants anywhere in the world, with more than 10 percent of its users living outside the United States. In just four years, the number of restaurant reviews on the app has quickly eclipsed those on Yelp. As of September, users have logged more than 75 million ratings on Beli, compared with 52 million restaurant ratings published on Yelp over the last 21 years. (Beli claims millions of users, but declined to provide specifics.)
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post How Beli Ate Yelp appeared first on New York Times.
