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San Francisco Chronicle
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
A new restaurant rating app is luring young Bay Area diners away from Yelp
Zo Mendez didn't have a reservation at the hot new San Francisco restaurant Jules. So he arrived early, inconspicuously dressed in all black from his beanie to his Adidas high tops, and settled into a seat at the bar. While he hardly stood out from the crowd, Mendez is, by one measure, among the most powerful food influencers in the city. Mendez dominates on Beli, a restaurant rating app that's sending thousands of Bay Area foodies, particularly younger ones, into a frenzy. Beli users have left 3.6 million restaurant reviews in the Bay Area, said Chief Technology Officer Eliot Frost, who runs the company in New York City with his wife and co-founder, CEO Judy Thelen. Unlike other apps, such as the 20-year-old Yelp, where everyone sees ratings from strangers, Beli users only see their friends' reviews. But Mendez appears on the app-wide leaderboard — in San Francisco, he's the top-ranked user. 'It's tasty, dude,' he remarked after a waiter brought out a crudo appetizer with yellowtail, blood orange and capers. What pleased Mendez more, though, was the down-to-earth, satisfying pepperoni pizza. Per his 'pepperoni pizza rule,' he tries the trustworthy pie at every pizza restaurant he goes to, as a reference point. The meal at Jules ultimately earned an 8.2 rating out of 10, which Beli calculates for users by asking a series of 'this or that' comparisons to other restaurants a user has visited. For San Francisco's number one reviewer, Mendez is surprisingly minimal with his posts. Like all the reviews before it, the Jules review was barren, with no photos or descriptions — which the app allows — just a rating. He pays for all his meals himself, except for lunches delivered to the office of the company where he works. At 34 years old, Mendez said he's the oldest person he knows that uses Beli. The app doesn't collect age-related data, Thelen told the Chronicle in an interview, but it's 'relatively split' between a Gen Z and millennial audience. Powered by this younger user base, Beli boasts 70 million restaurant ratings worldwide — more than Yelp — Frost claimed. But most local owners told the Chronicle they'd never heard of Beli. Gerad Gobel of Rose Pizzeria, which is among Mendez's top-ranked restaurants, said it's unclear if Beli is impacting his business. Mendez recently awarded it a 9.8, causing 87 of his followers to bookmark the restaurant as one to try. But Gobel said it was more obvious when rave reviews from Chronicle critics and New York Times lists boosted reservations at his neighborhood restaurant. 'I don't know when we started getting reviewed on Beli, but I would say, in the past four or five months, you can definitely tell we're getting a more 20-something crowd,' Gobel said. Still, the app wasn't personally appealing to him. 'I'm a millennial with creaking bones now,' he said. 'I am currently out of the Zeitgeist.' Brandon Rice, chef-owner of the San Francisco restaurant Ernest, was also unfamiliar with the app. But he downloaded Beli for the first time to check it out. 'Ernest is pretty good on it,' Rice said, referring to the restaurant's 8.8 average rating across over 4,000 reviews. 'Judy apparently didn't like it,' the chef noted, referring to the Beli CEO: New accounts like Rice's are prompted to follow Thelen after registering, contributing to her follower count of over 730,000. She gave Ernest a 6.2. Thelen said Beli doesn't consider itself a review platform, but rather a 'social restaurant list-keeping app' — a difference she strongly emphasized. The app helps users remember where they've been and where they'd like to go next. This list-keeping element was what drew Stanford masters student Matthew Lee onto the app during his undergraduate years at UC Berkeley. Lee said he'd embarked on a mission to try every restaurant in his college town just around the time that Beli emerged as a 'bandwagon' trend among friends. 'It became maybe a little competitive, somewhere along the way,' Lee said. He seems to be winning that competition: he's now the top-ranked Beli user in Berkeley. Compared to the Beli, Yelp reviews come with pressure, Lee said, recognizing how much those reviews impact business owners and are viewed by strangers looking for their next meal. Beli, on the other hand, is mostly for friends. 'There's just stuff that would not make it to Yelp,' Lee said, 'like 'Oh my god, I was so big-backed,' with a picture of a completely demolished plate,' he went on, using a popular Gen-Z slang for overeating. For Frost and Thelen, the focus remains on growing Beli's user base and virality. The company has raised $12 million since its founding in 2021. Thelen told the Chronicle, but she doesn't want Beli to operate like a 'traditional consumer tech startup.' 'We run as lean as possible,' Thelen said, referring to Beli's current full-time team of just four, including her and Frost. The company has a partnership with OpenTable, letting customers book restaurants through the app. And the Beli Supper Club, which is an invite-only subscription to top-ranked users, brings in cash for the company, but is currently limited to New York City. Perks include partnership dinners at elusive restaurants. 'We get loads of requests to bring it elsewhere,' Thelen said, 'and S.F. is top of the list.'
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
World War II brought these top actors and spotlight of Hollywood to Fort Worth
Our Uniquely Fort Worth stories celebrate what we love most about North Texas, its history & culture. Story suggestion? Editors@ Hollywood was in Fort Worth news earlier this year with the nomination of Fort Worth's Abraham Alexander for an Academy Award for Best Song of the Year (from the 2024 movie 'Sing Sing'). The Nigerian-born Alexander attended Texas Wesleyan University before launching a musical career. Filmmakers' interest in Fort Worth might have originated in 1920 when the fledgling Lone Star Pictures announced plans to film its first motion picture here, 'a romance of the Texas oil fields.' It never happened, but in the years to come, some well-known Hollywood actors had a soft spot in their hearts for Cowtown. Gene Autry visited Fort Worth in 1936 and asked the manager of the New Liberty theater, 'Do they like my pictures here?' The manager assured him, 'Next to Buck Jones, you're tops!' Twenty years later, Fort Worth made Jimmy Stewart an honorary citizen and deputy sheriff. Fort Worth was also home to some top Hollywood talent during World War II. They were here because of Tarrant Field — renamed Carswell Air Force Base in 1948 — as part of the Army Air Forces Training Command. In the summer of 1942, the the command opened a combat training school at Tarrant Field for pilots on the heavy bombers being produced next door at the Consolidated Vultee plant (now Lockheed Martin). George Gobel was one of the Hollywood types who answered his country's call in 1942. At the time, he was a little-known singer-turned-comedian who had been performing since the age of 11. The military sent him to Fort Worth to teach men to fly the B-24 Liberator. When off duty, Gobel entertained the men on his guitar, weaving humor into his act. He got the nickname 'Lonesome George' for his low-key, self-deprecating humor. He also coined a catch phrase that would follow him the rest of his life: 'Well, I'll be a dirty bird.' After the war, Gobel performed in night clubs until in 1954 he got his own TV show. When that ended in 1957, he moved on to Broadway and the movies. In 1972, he became a regular on Hollywood Squares. Gobel attributed his success to compensating for what nature didn't give him and to luck. He told an interviewer years later, 'When I went into the Air Force, I was 5 feet 4½ inches. The limit was 5 feet 5. Life has always been like that.' Burgess Meredith may have been Fort Worth's favorite actor-turned-soldier and was certainly the biggest stage and screen star to come to town in uniform. Star-Telegram readers learned about him in 1937 when he was proclaimed 'the brightest young star on Broadway.' Five years later, he came through Fort Worth as a buck private on a troop train. In August 1942, he came back to Fort Worth, disembarking at the Texas & Pacific station as Lt. Burgess Meredith of the Army Air Forces. He was assistant public relations officer at Tarrant Field. He had spent the previous month making the training film 'Rear Gunner' with co-star Ronald Reagan. It was so good, the government released it in theaters. Lt. Meredith's work with the Air Training Command wasn't what intrigued readers after Fort Worth Press columnist Jack Gordon informed his female readers that the twice-divorced Meredith was available. In short order he was romantically linked with a Fort Worth woman, Mary Parker, though Meredith dismissed the rumors, saying, 'We're just good friends.' After the war, Meredith did not miss a beat resuming his film career. Eventually, he created the acclaimed roles of 'The Penguin' on the 'Batman' TV series (1966-68) and Mickey, Rocky Balboa's crusty trainer, in three Sylvester Stallone movies. William Holden was the third Hollywood star to 'play' Fort Worth during World War II. Born William Franklin Beedle, he took the stage name he is known by when he first began acting. In August 1942, he left behind a budding acting career to enter the Army, showing up in Fort Worth that fall as a private working behind a desk at Tarrant Field. He was soon off to Air Force Officer Candidate School in Miami. When Holden came back to Fort Worth he was wearing the gold bars of a second lieutenant. No flier, Holden was assigned to the public relations office, serving as liaison with the city of Fort Worth while doing weekly radio broadcasts of 'The Army Air Force Show' over the Mutual Broadcasting network, which included KFJZ. Rather than tell his listeners about the war in the abstract, he told human-interest stories about servicemen who had performed heroically. The broadcasts from (Will Rogers) Municipal Auditorium proved hugely popular with the local audience. And as an officer Holden got to move out of the barracks, initially into the Worth Hotel, then into an apartment near TCU. In January 1943, Holden was joined by his wife, actress Brenda Marshall, who had North Texas roots, having been a student in 1936 at Texas Women's College (Denton). Her latest movie, 'Life Begins at 8:30,' was playing at the Hollywood theater when she got to town. In May 1944, she was back in Fort Worth visiting her husband and appearing with him on his radio show. Holden's official duties took him out into the community doing public relations for the Army Air Forces. He was elected executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce and coached third base for a Fort Worth Cats exhibition game. When not doing his military duties, Holden could be seen playing the drums, jamming with fellow musicians in the Den Room of the Hotel Texas. In 1959, while promoting his latest movie, 'The Horse Soldiers,' Holden cane through Fort Worth for the first time since the war. He reminisced with reporters about his two-year stay in Fort Worth during the war, mentioning sharing an apartment with big-league baseball player Hank Greenberg, another enlistee with the Air Training Command. Holden recalled how they hung out their wash on the railing of their second-floor apartment, much to the dismay of the owner. When the Army sent Holden back to California to work with the Motion Picture Unit making training films, he was replaced on the Army Air Forces radio show by another actor-turned-soldier, George Montgomery. Often compared to Clark Gable, Montgomery had worked steadily in Hollywood right up until 1943, when he joined the Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit, a U.S. Army unit made up entirely of film professionals. Cpl. Montgomery came to Fort Worth for a month in January 1944 to be 'guest host' for the radio show while Holden was away. After the war, Hollywood seemed to have fallen completely in love with Fort Worth. In 1951, the major studios had three movies in production about our city: Warner Brothers' 'Fort Worth' with Randolph Scott, RKO's 'High Frontier' with Anne Baxter, and Twentieth Century Fox's 'Follow the Sun' with Glenn Ford. Only the Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox films reached the screen, but Hollywood was not done with Fort Worth, nor Fort Worth with Hollywood. Author-historian Richard Selcer is a Fort Worth native and proud graduate of Paschal High and TCU.
San Francisco Chronicle
15-05-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
One of the Bay Area's most celebrated pizzerias is coming to S.F.
San Francisco is getting a home for charred, nationally praised Bay Area pizza. Berkeley's hit Rose Pizzeria is opening a second location at 1 Clement St. in the Inner Richmond. Rose, which the New York Times named among the country's best pizza restaurants and the Chronicle placed at No. 13 on the Top 100 restaurants list, will open there late this year or early next, said co-owner Gerad Gobel, who runs the pizzeria with Alexis Rorabaugh. They've had their eyes on the corner space, a former location of the Village Pizzeria chain, for a year and finally landed the lease. The menu isn't finalized but diners can expect the same blistered pies with punchy topping combinations that Rose is known for. With a space almost triple the size of the original, they'll be able to produce more, possibly including house-made gelato and other pizza styles, such as thin, crispy Roman-style tonda or canotto, a puffy Neapolitan pie. They hope to build a small wine cave to sell bottles. The couple looks forward to joining San Francisco's pizza scene, which, Gobel said, is 'strong.' (The city continues to welcome a wave of new pizzerias, such as hit popup Jules, opening its brick-and-mortar location May 20.) Design plans for the San Francisco restaurant show a 700-square-foot dining room with a checkered floor and small bar area, plus a to-go window, dough room and sidewalk seating. Gobel and Rorabaugh opened Rose Pizzeria on University Avenue in 2021. It soon became a neighborhood, then a national, favorite for pizzas as well as natural wine and desserts like tiramisu and olive oil cake. Chronicle associate restaurant critic Cesar Hernandez wrote in a 2023 review that Rose 'tweaks classic pies with spice and smoke while showcasing big, unflinching flavors.' In March, Rorabaugh ranked among the top five competitors for world's best cheese pizza slice at the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas, the largest pizza-making competition in the country. The pair is also soon opening an all-day cafe and wine bar, called Cafe Brusco, in Berkeley.
