From Group Chats To Great Meals: How Zest Is Rethinking Restaurant Discovery
Zest is a social dining app that turns verified visits into a map, allowing users and friends to see and share where they actually eat.
The short answer
Zest is a social dining app built on verified visits.
| Category | Consumer |
|---|---|
| Founder | Mario Gomez-Hall, Cofounder and CEO |
| Website | www.zestmaps.com |
What does Zest do?
Zest is a social dining app built on verified visits. People link a card (read only and optional), and their real dining history becomes a map. They see where friends actually eat, not what strangers rate. An iMessage agent brings that into the group chat.
The current landscape
Restaurant discovery typically is all about ratings from strangers. Google Maps and Yelp aggregate reviews and photos, and Beli and Instagram let you show off the trendy places you go to. Meanwhile, the real decision happens in a group text or from word-of-mouth recommendations after going somewhere. Zest starts from behavior: the places you went, automatically saved for yourself and friends to see and chat about in-app or in iMessage.
How Zest started
As a frequent traveler, Zest’s founder Mario was constantly scrolling through his camera roll to remember the name of a place he liked, or asking friends for their favorite spots in Mexico City or Austin from previous trips. His friends had the same issue: useful recommendations stuck in group chats and screenshots. He had spent four years leading design on Lyft's consumer app and wanted the opposite of a review site: a map that fills itself in.
The Zest solution
Zest works globally from day one: linking a card autofills your map with up to two years of past dining, so you can see where you’ve been and browse friends’ maps, too. Notes and Fresh Picks sit on top. Backed by 776 and Kindred, covered by TechCrunch and WIRED, with more than 100,000 restaurant visits mapped since launch. Card linking imports up to two years of past dining, so the map is populated on day one. Next is Zest's iMessage agent: text it, or add it to a group chat, and it answers from your table's actual history. No app required.
Every app asks you to rate things, and almost nobody does. But everyone eats. We build on what people already do, and now we're putting it where they already talk.
>
— Mario Gomez-Hall, Cofounder and CEO
A Zest customer story
The stories the Zest team hears most all have the same shape. Someone is somewhere new: a city abroad or just a neighborhood across town, and needs to pick a place. Zest finds them something that feels like themselves: a family-run BBQ joint where the sweet tea keeps coming or a bakery with a fruit tart good enough to bring to a potluck.
The team culture at Zest
Zest is a small, hands-on team that values ownership, fast experiments, and thoughtful product craft. The team is ambitious and quality-obsessed, with strong opinions and open minds.
Frequently asked questions
What is Zest?
Zest is a social dining app built on verified visits that automatically turns a user's real dining history into a map.
Who founded Zest?
Zest was co-founded by CEO Mario Gomez-Hall, who previously led design on Lyft's consumer app.
How does Zest work?
Users can link a card on a read-only, optional basis to autofill their map with up to two years of past dining history. Friends can browse each other's maps, view notes and Fresh Picks, or interact via an iMessage agent directly in group chats.
How does Zest differ from alternative restaurant discovery platforms?
Instead of relying on ratings, reviews, and photos from strangers like Yelp and Google Maps, Zest maps real visits and behavior so users can see where their friends actually eat.
