As Mario Gomez-Hall walks me through his new restaurant discovery app, Zest Maps, the founder pauses on its user leaderboard and highlights a profile topping the charts with over 1,000 visits logged. It’s Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley helping test the beta version.
“He’s given us really useful feedback,” Gomez-Hall says. “It’s sort of a spiritual successor to Foursquare.” (For those who may not remember, Foursquare was a hot location check-in social app around 2010 when GPS-enabled apps were first trending.)
The core gist of Zest Maps, rolling out today for iOS users (no Android support yet), is the automatic logging of every restaurant and cafe you visit by tracking your credit card swipes and using your data to highlight other food spots you may enjoy. The app’s AI tools analyze your dining history and tailor a map of nearby recommendations with photos and descriptions of each spot’s vibe.
Courtesy of Zest
Zest also aggregates this user data to flag up-and-coming restaurants in your area, along with the new spots your friends visit. “We only show the first visit to a place,” he says. “So, if you keep going back to the same pizzeria, we’re not spamming your friends with the same pizzeria.” Visits to chain restaurants also aren’t often highlighted on Zest. The app pays more attention to your date night at the Brazilian steakhouse than some after-work McDouble.
Gomez-Hall knows that some users will be hesitant to link their cards, emphasizing that the feature is optional and facilitated by Plaid, a popular platform that connects fintech apps to your bank; services like Google Wallet and Wealthfront use Plaid. “We’re not seeing your OnlyFans,” he says. “We’re only looking at food and drink.” In addition to only analyzing dining transactions, Zest allows users to control who can see their visits as friends and delete any restaurant visit.
The founder’s profile breaks down his 966 logged visits into the top-five categories: cafe, bakery, Thai, pizza, and Japanese. His profile shows Delicious Thai Kitchen and Ike’s Love & Sandwiches in Oakland as a couple of his “go-to” spots, as well as saved lists of restaurants he wants to visit, either nearby or on vacation. Whenever a friend goes to a spot you’ve saved, it’s likely highlighted on your Zest Map.
His aspirations with Zest are focused, looking to complement apps people currently use rather than attempting to displace established players. “A niche network is maybe even more valuable, in a lot of ways, because you have such a focused user base,” he says. “We don’t really want to try to be this everything app that beats Google and Yelp. We want to be the thing about food discovery and tracking.”
