28-05-2025
Strava for restaurants: The app turning eating out into a competitive sport
Stumbling in from a cocktail-heavy night, the first thing Lindsay Wimms does when she gets back to her West Village flat is rank all the bars and restaurants she has been to.
No matter how viciously her head is spinning, or how late the hour, the 30-year-old corporate events planner will log into the restaurant rating app Beli and input every last drink.
'I drunkenly do it straight away, it's like an addiction,' Ms Wimms, who is the 123rd top user on the app's leaderboard, said. 'I treat it like a sport.'
These days, they say if you don't log your run on Strava, or post a sunkissed holiday snap to Instagram, did it even happen
Now, if you don't rank your meal on Beli, did you even eat?
Before Beli, which launched as an invite-only app in 2021, foodies like Ms Wimms obsessively tracked their restaurants on colour-coded spreadsheets.
Ms Wimms, who moved to New York from London in 2020, is among more than one million foodies who exhaustively rate everywhere they eat and drink for the world to see on the app.
It is not a cheap hobby. She spends up to $3,000 a month eating out six times a week to cling onto her spot on the leaderboard.
'Ideally, I'd like to get to the top 100, but I feel like everyone else ahead of me is continuing to eat as aggressively as me,' she says.
Trying new places is not always easy in New York, a city where, despite being home to more than 20,000 restaurants, is known for its fierce competition for restaurant reservations.
Tables in trendy spots are often snapped up by tech whizzes who have created bots, who then make tens of thousands of dollars selling bookings on.
Beli was created by Judy Thelen and Eliot Frost, a restaurant-obsessed couple who live for trying new places.
Ms Thelen and Mr Frost, who met in their early 20s while working at consultancy firm McKinsey, soon realised they were not the only New Yorkers who kept an extensive Google Maps list to document all the restaurants they'd been to.
'Pretty much every foodie we spoke to kept some kind of restaurant list... but there was just no central place where everybody was keeping them together,' Mr Frost, 33, told The Telegraph over a Zoom call.
They were onto something. Now, four years after it launched, Beli has more than 55 million restaurant ratings and 683,000 Instagram followers.
The app asks users to compare restaurants, bars, or coffee shops to places they've been to before, which generates a personalised ranking out of 10.
It uses this information to give users a 'rec score' for other restaurants in the app, which guesses how much someone will like a particular restaurant based on their previous ratings.
Beli, while popular, is currently pre-revenue. Ms Thelen says they want to make sure they can turn into a sustainable business and do not want to introduce adverts as they fear it will break down the trust of their members.
One of the couple's most surprising findings from launching Beli was just how seriously users took the leaderboard.
'Our friends were competing and they were not even big foodies... people care a lot about their rank,' Ms Thelen, 31, told The Telegraph.
So what does it take to be number one?
For years the prized position has been held by Gary Weller, who has ranked 6,913 establishments on the app.
Mr Weller, 37, who is based in Philadelphia and frequently travels for his real estate job, joined the app in 2022.
If you name a New York restaurant, he's probably eaten there. He eats out three times a day, most days of the week.
The amount he spends on food fluctuates. Some months he has spent more than $10,000 on meals. Last year he spent $2,500 at Korean restaurant Atomix, in Midtown Manhattan, on one meal for him and his wife.
Once, he was usurped on the leaderboard by a Chicago-based account, who climbed to the top with fake reviews, and began taunting him with emails and messages on Instagram. The profile was quickly removed.
'I'm sure other people will tell you differently, but if someone passed me I wouldn't be that upset about it,' he says.
While Beli is used across the world, including in London, the majority of its users are concentrated in New York.
The top ranked user in the city is Sola Park, who confesses that other than assembling the odd salad in her apartment, she hasn't cooked in more than two years.
Ms Park, 29, who works for Blackrock, has rated 4,294 restaurants and spends around $2,000-a-month on food, but has splurged $1,000 on a meal before. She also documents eating out on Instagram and TikTok.
'I'm extremely competitive... so if there is an option for me to try a new place, I definitely will,' she said.
Beli also brought out Allan Liang's competitive side, who at one point created his own bot to try and bag restaurant reservations.
The data science consultant, 26, is ranked number four on Beli, having rated 4,603 places.
Being on the app made his desire to try new restaurants 'more extreme' and there are days when he eats or drinks at 20 different places.
'I try to actively tell myself this app could close down tomorrow and none of this would matter,' he says.
Beli has also had an enormous impact on the restaurants it features.
While the New York Times's top 100 list or Time Out magazine used to be the holy grails for foodies in New York, many now use social media and apps like Beli to choose where to visit.
Two months after opening, Beli posted a video on Instagram about Mexican restaurant Son Del North, describing it as 'our favourite new burrito in NYC'. The impact was immediate.
'It was like being on the front page of the New York Times,' founder and chef Annisha Garcia, 34, told The Telegraph.
Foodies descended on the location in Manhattan's Lower East Side, forming queues that snaked down the road to get their hands on one of the carne asada burritos.
The restaurant almost tripled its takings from around $30,000-per-week to $80,000. It has since opened a second location in West Village.
'Beli is built for the people and by the people... it helped us a lot,' Ms Garcia says.
