Sharing restaurant recommendations with friends
How many times have you been hungry but couldn’t decide what to eat? For me, the number is more than I can count. I love eating — I love trying new foods, exploring new restaurants, and sharing these places with my friends. Most of all, I love Chinese food. I grew up in Beijing, China eating Chinese food almost every day. Since coming to America, Chinese food has become an even larger part of my cultural identity. We moved my Beijing to a small suburban town in Los Angeles, where we discovered that the flavors we loved were not so readily available. My mom turned to friends and neighbors to ask for recommendations of where we could go, and slowly but surely we learned the best places to eat in the area. Even after moving to New York, Chinese food still has a special place in my heart. It reminds me of my hometown, my family, and the new friends we made, and how our common pursuit of the taste of home created these bonds.
Food is a powerful tool to connect people. A common love for food allows us to build new relationships and strengthen existing ones. However, the way that we currently look for new restaurants does nothing to build these relationships. When you look online at Google or Yelp or any of these other sites for ideas of where to eat, you are scrolling through hundred of reviews from people you don’t know and will never meet. This essential bond is lost over the magnitude of the internet, and finding new restaurants loses its spark of bringing people together.
We are proposing an application that can bring this joy back into searching for restaurants. Instead of crowdsourcing reviews, this app can tap into your existing social networks and help people connect with friends and friends of friends to receive restaurant recommendations. This way, you can get information from people you know and trust, filtering out the information that might not be relevant for you, while allowing you to ask more questions and connect with others.
Let’s bring the social aspect back to restaurant recommendations.
