Beli

I was bemoaning the lack of restaurant tracking apps when I came across Beli. It literally has everything that I wanted, mainly the ability to filter by price, location, cuisine, etc. A couple critiques: The ranking system gets a little tedious, and although you can say “too tough,” I wish I could opt out of it completely. I don’t really need a ranking of the places I’ve been- I’d rather make my own list within that of places I’ve liked. And it’s difficult to compare an ice cream place with an upscale steak house. Also, and this is very minute, it would be great if the short list icon was listed on the main restaurant page and not hidden within the labels. Would just be a bit easier. Being able to create your own labels would be really nice, too. I hope they are able to create a desktop-compatible app soon. I would love to be able to organize on a bigger screen! All in all, it’s a great app and I will be recommending to literally everyone. Update: Can you make it so that we can scroll through the search suggestions without it constantly reverting back to the keyboard after I click on a restaurant?

I really love this concept! They have a pretty comprehensive directory of restaurants in NYC. Sometimes the address is incorrect, but if you report it, they fix it in about 24 hours. I have two suggestions to improve it. Number one would be to rank restaurants ONLY amongst other restaurants in their category (either by Cusine category or based on the tag (date night, brunch, cocktails, etc.)) Otherwise, what happens is you start comparing apples and oranges. It's not fair to rank a Korean BBQ restaurant against a brunch pancake spot or against a lunch deli. There isn't a comparison there. My rankings can get a little wonky and overstated or understated because it makes me compare restaurants to other restaurants that are completely different aesthetics or purposes. A fancy dinner date spot isn't comparable to a bagel shop. It would be great if I could either rank all of brunch spots against only brunch spots. Similarly, all of my Italian restaurants against ony other Italian restaurants. Second is to add more tags. They're kind of random right now! A good few to add would be: brunch, first date, healthy, aesthetic interior, rooftop, etc.)

Beli was recommended to me by a friend along with a warning that I’d have to put a few hours of work in to get the most out of it. I spent a NYC > DC train ride enthralled with the app and bugging my wife about which of our favorite places she’d prefer. The accuracy of the relative ranking of preferences is evident in the spot-on scores I see for places I’ve already been to and had forgotten to rate. The option to tag certain places for certain use cases (nice dinner out versus late night eats) fine-tunes the recommendations based on what you want at the time. For the lazy foodies, Beli greases the skids to a quick decision and you know that every time you go out, the recommendations will only get better. For the creatures of habit, Beli curates a path away from the over-used local haunts and into the hidden gems you always walk by. I imagine that great, tiny restaurants with limited means for advertising and signage are thankful for this app, as it brings people like me away from the go-to restaurants