If you know me, you know I love sharing my restaurant recommendations and photos. So, when I learned about this restaurant app called Beli, I knew I needed to download it immediately.
Rate Restaurants
To rate a restaurant on Beli, just search for any restaurant, and click the "+" icon. You'll then choose between "I liked it!", "It was fine," or "I didn't like it".
After selecting an option, you have the choice to add labels for what the restaurant is "good for." You can contribute that it is good for anything from the atmosphere to cash only to large portions to takeout.
You also have the choice to select what was wrong with the restaurant—options include bad ambiance, a long wait, too loud, or unsanitary. Did you go to this place with a friend who is also on Beli? You can tag them in your rating! You can also add any notes you have on the restaurant, your favorite dishes, and photos.
The actual rating process is done through comparison. Your first-ever rating is given a baseline score for whether you liked it, thought it was fine, or didn't like it. But, this changes as you accumulate more rated restaurants.
The app shows you the restaurant you are rating and a restaurant you've previously rated. You then choose which of these restaurants you enjoyed more. Or, you can decide that the comparison is too tough, skip it, or go back to the previous comparison if you've changed your mind. This process is repeated until the comparisons make clear where this restaurant's score should fall in relation to the others.
Save Restaurants
You and your friends can follow each other on Beli, which means you can see each other's lists of restaurant ratings. If your friend rates a restaurant highly, you can save it to your bookmarks to remind yourself that you want to go there.
You can also search for restaurants to save. When going to save a restaurant, Beli gives you a rating based on how much they think you would like it based on your other ratings—how nice of them! They give you the average rating that your friends have given the restaurant, as well as show you photos that other Beli users have posted from there.
Recommend Restaurants
Beli curates recommendations for you from the ratings you have given similar restaurants. They also create guides for users based on the labels given on the ratings. These guides are city-specific and cater to every need. Examples include "Top 10 Dinner with Parents NYC," "NYC Best Cacio e Pepe Search," and "Top 10 Healthy Eats NYC." Whatever the occasion, you can find a restaurant on Beli.
Profiles
There's even more fun to Beli—they analyze your ratings to present a "Taste Profile." This profile summarizes the different countries and cities you've visited and how many restaurants you've rated there. It also includes the cuisines and types of food rated. My most popular cuisine, for example, is American, with Italian being a close second...no surprise for me there. I've also rated restaurants in 5 countries and 13 cities!