Stop Asking ‘Where Should We Eat?’ and Just Check Your Beli Feed
Image Courtesy of Snapshots
By Anthony Curioso
This is an independently submitted op-ed and does not reflect the views of The Tower.
About two weeks ago, I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across an ad for Beli. It’s an app that, much like Yelp or Google, allows users to rank restaurants, bars, coffee shops, bakeries, and ice cream shops they have visited, whether in their hometown or almost anywhere else in the world.
Beli launched in 2021 out of a desire from its founders—a married couple, Judy Thelen and Eliot Frost—to help foodies find restaurants that suit their unique tastes.
Once I downloaded Beli and began setting up my account, I discovered that I could also see how my friends have ranked the food and drink places they’ve been —just as one can use a platform called Letterboxd to do the same for movies—and see how much the app thinks I would like the places that others have ranked based on my own previous rankings. Similar to movies on Letterboxd, Beli users can also bookmark places they want to try but haven’t yet visited.
One distinctive feature of Beli is that it allows users to see which places have been ranked by other students and alumni from their university or college. Upon seeing the list of people from CUA who were already on the app, I realized I was quite late to the Beli app trend, especially compared to other CUA students and recent graduates. When I last looked, at least twenty-five other users had claimed CUA as their university, and I noticed that several of the people in my phone contacts who attended CUA at some point had also downloaded the app.
CUA is not the only university in the United States with a notable presence of students and alumni on the Beli app. At the beginning of March, just before CUA’s spring break, a current senior from Georgetown University published an article about it on the GU Student Life Blog. In the piece, he shared his experience of trying to work through a list compiled using the Beli app of places he wanted to visit. Additionally, the app has grown a significant user base at other schools outside DC with larger populations than CUA, including Stanford University, Tulane University, and the University of Connecticut.
Another feature of Beli that surprised me was that users who referred friends to the app unlocked access to features that others do not have, such as the ability to see an average of all Beli members’ ratings of a place, add links to their other social media accounts onto their Beli profile, and search for the places with the best available versions of a specific dish.
Users can also share or claim reservations at nearly all locations listed on the Beli app. These reservations are made through the popular restaurant and bar reservations app, OpenTable, with which Beli has a conspicuous partnership. I’m now working to determine how to share or claim a reservation and whether I can complete these actions at this stage, since I haven’t yet successfully referred anyone to the Beli app via a referral link.
Overall, Beli seems like a great way for CUA students to find new places to eat with their friends and family. I am excited to visit and review the places featured in the “DC Delicacies” articles published recently in The Tower’s Quill section. So far, this segment comprises three articles, in which Sam Bergstrom, a freshman and The Tower staff writer, has reviewed Compliments Only, The Harp, and Bread Bite Bakery. I look forward to ranking these locations on my Beli account!
Beli is available for free download via the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
