As Mario Gomez-Hall walks me through his new restaurant discovery app, Zest Maps, the founder pauses on its user leaderboard and highlights a profile topping the charts with over 1,000 visits logged. It’s Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley, helping test the beta version.

“He's given us really useful feedback,” Gomez-Hall says. “It's sort of a spiritual successor to Foursquare.” (For those who may not remember, Foursquare was a hot location check-in social app around 2010 when GPS-enabled apps were first trending.)

The core gist of Zest Maps, rolling out today for iOS users (no Android support yet), is the automatic logging of every restaurant and cafe you visit by tracking your credit card swipes and using your data to highlight other food spots you may enjoy. The app’s AI tools analyze your dining history and tailor a map of nearby recommendations with photos and descriptions of each spot’s vibe.

Zest also aggregates this user data to flag up-and-coming restaurants in your area, along with the new spots your friends visit. “We only show the first visit to a place,” he says. “So, if you keep going back to the same pizzeria, we're not spamming your friends with the same pizzeria.” Visits to chain restaurants also aren’t often highlighted on Zest. The app pays more attention to your date night at the Brazilian steakhouse than some after-work McDouble.

Gomez-Hall knows that some users will be hesitant to link their cards, emphasizing that the feature is optional and facilitated by Plaid, a popular platform that connects fintech apps to your bank; services like Google Wallet and Wealthfront use Plaid. “We're not seeing your OnlyFans,” he says. “We're only looking at food and drink.” In addition to only analyzing dining transactions, Zest allows users to control who can see their visits as friends and delete any restaurant visit.

The founder’s profile breaks down his 966 logged visits into the top five categories: cafe, bakery, Thai, pizza, and Japanese. His profile shows Delicious Thai Kitchen and Ike’s Love & Sandwiches in Oakland as a couple of his “go-to” spots, as well as saved lists of restaurants he wants to visit, either nearby or on vacation. Whenever a friend goes to a spot you’ve saved, it’s likely highlighted on your Zest Map.

His aspirations with Zest are focused, looking to complement apps people currently use rather than attempting to displace established players. “A niche network is maybe even more valuable, in a lot of ways, because you have such a focused user base,” he says. “We don't really want to try to be this everything app that beats Google and Yelp. We want to be the thing about food discovery and tracking.”

Gomez-Hall sees younger adults in major city hubs, where restaurant options are more bountiful, as his core user base, plus people who want more personalized food recommendations when they travel.

In April, I wrote about why you should think twice before sharing financial information with AI tools like ChatGPT, which remains true. But I was surprised by just how much I liked the idea of Zest. The app’s value proposition will be too invasive for some who want to retain a tighter sense of privacy over their data, and it inherently won’t be as useful for people in more rural areas where dining options are more limited and well-trodden.

My partner and I are constantly chatting about our need to visit a better variety of spots for dinner in our San Francisco neighborhood. Automatically seeing every sushi counter and taco shop we’ve already hit, with recommendations about where to go next, sounds like it would save us from our standard 30-minute deliberation period of scrolling through multiple apps and online reviews.

Plus, I would love to see more insights into where my friends are actually dining out, beyond their blurry Instagram stories. My inner voyeur wants to know where you really went to eat during that week-long Tokyo getaway, because I need recommendations for my next trip. (I’m also just nosey.)

The social location-sharing aspect of Foursquare was tremendously popular when it first came out over a decade ago, but since then, the novelty of GPS-powered apps has worn off. Today, many users are increasingly sensitive about how their location data is being shared. If the app can maintain a sense of trust with the users who choose to share their info, Zest Maps may be a sharp successor to Foursquare, reviving social food recommendations and offering picks honed to what you really want to eat.