When Julia Mancuso, a 23-year-old New York City transplant who works in finance, attended a Happy Hour organized by Deloitte in midtown Manhattan, she hit it with her fellow young colleagues. The two decided to keep in touch. But at the end of the night they didn’t change phone numbers or Instagram handles. Beli.
In a time of major changes in the approach to online reviews of restaurants in 2025, some members of Gen Z have not received advice on where to eat from legacy media publications Yelp reviews, neighborhood lists, or articles. They follow a network of friends on a platform that meshes restaurant reviews with social media. Beli may be the most Gen Z-induced dietary resource ever, but you may not have heard of it.
“It sounds ridiculous, but whether you’re trying out a new cocktail bar or dinner spot, you can get to know someone based on your profile and what you want to do in your free time,” Mancuso says.
Beli is a global resource and social hub of reviews and recommendations, and eats up a digitized feed of data-generated suggestions, friend reviews, and bookmarked spots. The platform is easy to use. After users have visited any kind of business, from nature wine bars at moments like Manhattan Cellar 36 to sellers of Bushwick Carnitas, they can post reviews of tight knit circles or Berri public. It also serves as a one-stop shop for users to match every location on the radar. This is more than collecting dust on memo apps such as the Victory Son Bakery, Smith Lean, and John Needitch Cocktail Bar.
This app encourages a series of comparisons between new locations and already visited locations. For example, you can rank HA snack bars that are higher than Wu’s Wonton King and snails but lower than Borgo, based on the rankings of newly cut restaurants and bars. The app generates user scores and tailored recommendations.
Since its launch in 2021 by co-founders Judy Thelen and Eliot Frost, whom I met while working at consulting firm McKinsey & Company in 2015, Beli has become a fixture for a particular sector of the New York dining scene. Currently, NYU students are downloading the app on Freshman Orientation. The Murray Hill girl said, “Wait, are you in Berry?” before adding everyone around the table. The single depicts Veri statistics for the hinge profile. “If you rank better in Berry than me, I’ll fall for you,” said the profile I met.
Beli doesn’t just produce restaurant recommendations. Users often tag their meal companions and write detailed reviews that eventually accumulate a food journal of sorts. The app tracks each user’s cooking footprint and creates a world map of locations reviewed by users, unlike the foursquare interface nearly 20 years ago.
The app offers multiple ways to gain status, introducing new users, ranking more restaurants, and entering new rankings each week. Each of these statistics is visualized in member profiles, and according to multiple users, the app is urging members to try new foods, food and neighborhoods. Beli also like Duolingo, posts app-wide and city-wide leaderboards of people who rank the most places and frequently tweak users to keep their winning streak alive.
Whether the app has the ability to view through the scene is often a culture restaurant that permeates New York. Above Berry A list of the city’s most rated restaurants It’s a generic, non-original restaurant with questionable hype, expensive food and virality of tiktok, including Charles Prime Rib and Don Angie. For some, Beli contributes to creepy topics and makes it even more impossible to hook up hyped reservations rather than elevate the unpretentious, understated joints that diversify the food scene.
“As a native New Yorker, what I don’t like is (Beli) steals a very integral part of New York. The corner bagel shop is your bagel shop and that’s the best.” “People get out of the neighborhood and get these things that should probably be kept as local stuff.”
Given its structure, Berri can undoubtedly reach a population with disposable income, frequently rank new locations, and create a spiritual palate for herds. Its gaming algorithm can create the idea that it is one place, whether it’s Joe’s pizza for slices of pepperoni or a corner store for French dips. But while Beli may seem like another example of Gen Z’s tendency to enhance real-life experiences online, some users see it as a way to capture sentimental moments.
“Yeah, that restaurant is where I went on my first date, or the restaurant is where my friends and I caught up and had a really good time,” says Elisa Cose, a student at the Institute of Fashion Technology.
The user chooses to set the profile as public or private. Gillian Feinglass ranks 29th across the app after introducing over 40 people, but she likes to maintain Berri’s intimacy among friends alone.
“I don’t want the meaning that Yelp or Google reviews have, for example,” she says. “These are my own ideas and I share them with my community. I get very creative with my summaries and restaurant ideas.”
“I’ve returned enthusiastically to my beloved UWS Ice Cream Haven, but I’ve discovered that they made the undeniably stupid decision with a tragic misguidedness to interrupt God’s coffee brownie chip flavor.” Feinglass’s Review of Boston-based chain Emack & Bolio’s.
One of the Kink Belis Beli that Beli is trying to tackle is its often unkillable ranking system. Many users dislike the way they force comparisons between restaurants with completely different atmospheres and food.
“How can I compare my favorite taco stands on the side of my road at 3 Michelin Star Restaurant?” says Feinglass, who currently uses Beli in Washington, DC, after first downloading the app in his hometown of New York.
They had two complaints when co-founders Selen and Frost explored the New York food scene together. Tracking where and where to try is overwhelming, and many of the city’s best restaurants didn’t suit their tastes.
“Almost every foodie we spoke to kept a sort of restaurant list, whether it’s their memo app, or a document, spreadsheet, or a text thread, but there was no central place where everyone puts the list together,” Frost says. They began building solutions while attending Harvard Business School.
“As a native New Yorker, the thing I don’t like is that it takes away a very integral part of New York. The corner bagel shop is your bagel shop and that’s the best.”
When Beli launched in 2021, Thelen and Frost imagined millennials as their target audience. But they soon realized that apps were gaining attention in Gen Z, a chronically online generation that tends to adopt new apps and digitize real-world experiences. Currently, approximately 80% of the app’s users are under the age of 35.
Thelen attributes the special appeal of Gen Z to Gen Z in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, as it gives college students and recent graduates a unique driving force to experience the world firsthand and to explore the cities they have recently moved. App refined design and algorithm recommendations package reviews and recommendations for younger audiences. Unlike apps like Instagram and X that provide endless content streams to users, Beli’s food suggestions and a brief feed of friend reviews doesn’t encourage DoomScrolling.
After its first catch in New York City, the app’s popularity quickly expanded throughout the US. Currently, there are over 60 million global reviews, exceeding Yelp, with 10% of its user base being international. New York remains the largest hub for apps, while Chicago is the second closest. The founder refused to provide daily active user data, a key metric for app performance.
On a recent sunny Wednesday, I walked to Union Square Green Market and found a group of girls dressed in mini cardigans, thick sunglasses and pleated skirts that turned out to be first-year students at Northeastern University, visiting town from Boston for spring break. Two of them, Katie Che and Nicole Messer, chose every bite for each bite they bit when they traveled to town using a friend’s review in Berry. And they reminded each other to take pictures of the food before recording it on the app.
“I found the top three meals in Berri, New York,” says Choi. Choi says. “I have a friend in New York and after seeing so many of her reviews I decided where I wanted to go.
The app will access the same way that users chase the highest quality foods in their area, which sometimes comes from old and exaggerated spots, but some users will find their favorite experiences consist of more than just good dishes. NYU freshman Elya Rak informs her reviews on the sentimental aspects of each meal.
“My best ranking in Berry was dinner that none of us had with a friend who had touched our phone,” says Luck. However, when a check is paid, users will mostly fish out of their pocket to record their meals.
