Beli, a personalized restaurant discovery app, began with the mission to help each individual effortlessly find restaurants based on their tastes, not someone else’s.
Our Story
Our story started in 2015. Eliot and I met in NYC after undergrad and built our relationship around restaurants in the city. We were constantly looking for the very best places, but we struggled to find reliable reviews. We’d go to a critically acclaimed restaurant with five stars on one platform and three on another, and not know what to expect. Or even worse, we’d go to a restaurant that was consistently given great reviews across many platforms and be wildly disappointed by the meal.
Our journey brought us both to Harvard Business School, where we were determined to build a solution that allowed food lovers to consistently find and track the best restaurants. We envisioned a product where you no longer had to search — one that knew your tastes and told you the places that you would love at the click of a button (or even without one!).
After a summer of scoping out the problem and realizing many others felt similarly, we decided to leave the world of finance and go all-in on building a solution.
Growing the Team
It was at HBS where we met Melissa and Robbie. While both bonafide foodies, they joined Beli in September 2019 with some questions.
Robbie was skeptical of the value of tracking restaurants until he had a fantastic birthday dinner at Myers+Chang in Boston’s South End. He had chosen the restaurant after hours of online research and numerous texts to friends, only to realize later that it was his most recommended restaurant on Beli based on his dining history!
Melissa’s “aha moment” came in the HBS classroom when her professor showed data about how 5-star ratings do a bad job of predicting whether individual consumers would be satisfied with a particular brand. As Melissa said later, “I saw in the data that Beli was onto something.”
Since then, the team at Beli has been working very hard to provide the best restaurant discovery experience: from refining our recommender system and cultivating a community of avid food lovers, to scouring the Boston, New York, and Nantucket takeout scenes to help identify the best delivery and takeout options during COVID-19.
Our Vision
Our vision is to create a world that celebrates different tastes, and we think that food is a great place to start. When it comes to taste, there is no such thing as right or wrong. We want to embrace these differences.
While COVID-19 has halted dining out, we deeply believe that social distancing shouldn’t prohibit the pursuit of good eating (even at home). Meals are some of the most special parts of each day, and while it’s clear that the world of dining is changing — probably permanently — people are now more aware than ever what restaurants mean to them. It is in this context where we believe that a platform like Beli is most important. With many of our favorite restaurants adapting to the new world and fighting to keep serving and delighting their customers, the choice of where we eat makes a difference.
What’s next?
Beli will be launching this summer in Boston on an invite-only basis. If you’re interested in being included, sign up here. We always love to hear from people who care about food as much as we do.
In the meantime, we’ll be blogging, twice a week, all summer on the future of the restaurant industry, recommender systems, how to recreate iconic restaurant dishes at home, and more!
Stay tuned, safe, and hungry!
Judy, Eliot, Melissa, and Robbie
