Zest Launches AI Restaurant Discovery App That Learns Where You Actually Love to Eat
Finding a great restaurant can be surprisingly difficult. Online reviews are often overwhelming, social media recommendations can feel staged, and saved lists tend to become messy collections of places people never actually visit. Zest, a newly launched restaurant discovery app, wants to change that by using real dining behavior to recommend places people are more likely to enjoy.
The startup, founded in November 2024, has built an app that combines transaction data, artificial intelligence, and social curation to help users discover restaurants, coffee shops, bars, and neighborhood favorites based on where they truly spend their time and money.
Zest has raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding from investors including Alexis Ohanian’s 776 and Steve Jang’s Kindred Ventures. After months of beta testing with friends, family, and expanded user groups, the app is now available to the public. Since launch, Zest has already seen more than 100,000 visits and continues to gain traction.
What Makes Zest Different From Other Restaurant Apps
Many restaurant apps let users create wishlists, save favorite places, or browse reviews. Zest takes a different approach. Instead of relying only on what people say they like, it looks at where they actually go.
Users connect a credit card to the app, allowing Zest to import past dining transactions and build a personal map of restaurants, bars, and coffee spots they have visited. The app intentionally avoids tracking fast food and fast-casual locations to keep recommendations cleaner and more meaningful.
From there, Zest analyzes dining patterns, visit frequency, and spending habits to better understand a user’s taste. Over time, the app becomes smarter and more personalized, suggesting new places based on real behavior rather than generic popularity.
The idea is simple: if someone regularly returns to a small taco shop, a favorite wine bar, or a cozy neighborhood café, that says more about their taste than a one-time visit to a trendy restaurant.
Verified Dining Data Powers Personalized Recommendations
Zest imports transaction information through Plaid, a financial services platform commonly used by banks, budgeting tools, and fintech apps. This allows Zest to identify food and drink-related transactions while ignoring unrelated purchases.
According to co-founder Mario Gomez-Hall, this verified dining data helps the app surface places that may not always get attention on social media. Instead of prioritizing restaurants people visit for status or to post about online, Zest can highlight dependable local favorites and hidden gems.
Gomez-Hall explains that the app is designed to reveal the places people genuinely return to, from neighborhood burrito spots to reliable cafés and beloved hole-in-the-wall restaurants. By looking at frequency and spending, Zest can identify meaningful patterns that typical review platforms may miss.
A Social Dining Map Built Around Taste
Zest is not just a private recommendation engine. It also has a social layer that lets users follow friends, creators, or curated profiles to discover where other people are eating.
This can be useful both at home and while traveling. For example, someone visiting a new city could follow a local curator or a friend with similar taste to find restaurants that feel more personal than standard tourist recommendations.
Gomez-Hall’s background helps explain this direction. Before Zest, he worked on products focused on social curation, including music-based discovery. The goal is not simply to connect users with friends they already know, but also to help them find people with similar taste.
That becomes especially valuable in cities where restaurant options are abundant, but it can also matter in smaller towns where the best spots may be harder to uncover. Zest aims to make local discovery feel more curated, more trustworthy, and less dependent on noisy review scores.
AI and 80 Million Reviews Help Improve Discovery
In addition to transaction-based insights, Zest uses artificial intelligence and a large review database to strengthen its recommendations. The app draws from more than 80 million reviews across the web, ranging from professional dining sources to casual user-generated discussions.
This helps Zest better understand the character of each restaurant, what people like about it, and why it may be worth recommending. The combination of verified visits, AI analysis, and broad review data gives the app a more complete picture of both users and venues.
New Features: Notes and Fresh Picks
Zest is also preparing new features designed to make restaurant discovery more useful and personal.
One upcoming feature will allow users to add freeform notes to restaurants. These notes might include what dish to order, how to get a reservation, when to visit, or any other helpful tip. Instead of only saving a place, users can add context that makes the recommendation more valuable.
Another feature, called Fresh Picks, will suggest new restaurants to try around a user’s city. The experience is expected to work like a personalized discovery playlist, but for dining. Rather than scrolling endlessly through restaurant listings, users will receive curated suggestions based on their own habits and preferences.
Zest Could Expand Beyond Restaurants
Although Zest is launching with a focus on dining, the company’s ambitions may go further. The name was chosen as a nod to food, but also to the broader idea of having a “zest for life.”
In the future, the team could expand the app into other forms of local discovery, such as shopping, entertainment, or city hotspots. The same model that helps people find restaurants based on real-world behavior could potentially help them discover boutiques, galleries, nightlife, and other places worth visiting.
For now, Zest is focused on solving a familiar problem: helping people find better places to eat without relying on generic rankings, influencer posts, or cluttered saved lists.
By combining real dining data, AI-powered recommendations, and social curation, Zest is positioning itself as a more personal way to discover restaurants. If the app continues to grow, it could become a powerful tool for anyone looking to uncover hidden gems, revisit favorite local spots, and explore their city through the places people actually love.
