The Abridged version:
- Social dining app Beli emphasizes friend-based sharing and customizable rankings of Sacramento restaurants.
- Young diners are driving Beli’s early expansion, citing its stress-free nature and authenticity as its main draws.
- Its fans include Janice Chan, a local content creator and former Yelp Elite diner, and Localis chef/owner Chris Barnum-Dann.
A new dining app is capturing the screens of Sacramento’s younger diners, shaping how they discover and share their restaurant experiences.
Beli, launched in 2021, lets users track, rank and share restaurants with friends. The app’s founders designed Beli in hopes of replacing anonymous online reviews with personal recommendations from the people you trust. This shift in focus has helped it gain traction in cities across the country, including Sacramento.
“We like to say it’s an app for people who love food, not necessarily foodies,” said Beli CEO and co-founder Judy Thelen. “It’s about collecting experiences and remembering the places you love.”
In the past year, Beli has become the hot new restaurant review app for younger Sacramento diners and influencers. For chefs and restaurateurs such as Chris Barnum-Dann, the owner of Localis and Betty Wine Bar & Bistro, its focus on connection over criticism has been a welcome alternative to traditional review sites and apps.
“It’s a fresh take,” Barnum-Dann said. “Yelp and Google Reviews can feel like they’re built on negativity. Beli feels more like a community where people are sharing what they actually enjoy.”
From belly to Beli
Husband-and-wife team Thelen and CTO Eliot Frost created Beli after realizing how many diners, like themselves, kept personal journals.
“I had all these notes in my Notes app, spreadsheets and messages about where to eat,” Frost said. “I wanted one place that helped me keep track, not just for me, but with people I actually care about.”
The couple launched the app to bring those lists together in one place. Since its launch, users have logged more than 80 million restaurant ratings worldwide, said Frost. Instead of a rating system, Beli instructs diners to rank restaurants in order of preference — a recipe Thelen says leads to more honest and personalized feedback.
“There’s no incentive to write a thousand words,” Thelen said. “It’s more like, ‘Here’s what I liked, here’s what I didn’t,’ and that’s it.”
Farm to app
Barnum-Dann said he first heard about the app from a regular who used it to track where they had eaten around Sacramento.
“When someone posts about your restaurant there, it feels genuine,” Barnum-Dann said. “They’re not doing it for points or followers, it’s because they want to remember the experience.”
In addition, he said that Sacramento’s restaurant scene is the ideal place for an app like Beli to grow.
“People here care about local food, and they talk about it,” Barnum-Dann said. “Beli is word-of-mouth, but digital.”
The communal sense extends beyond restaurant owners. Janice Chan, a Sacramento-based content creator who runs the account @SacFoodAdventures on Instagram and TikTok, agreed that Sacramento’s collaborative food scene makes it an environment where Beli can thrive.
“Sacramento feels like a small big city,” Chan said. “A lot of us in the food scene know each other or at least follow each other, so Beli fits in naturally. It’s not about competing, it’s about sharing good food and good experiences.”
Chan said she sees the app as an on-the-phone extension of how Sacramento already operates.
“People here love supporting local spots,” Chan said. “When someone posts on Beli, it’s usually from a place of excitement, like a ‘you have to try this.’ That kind of word-of-mouth is what makes Sacramento special.”
Young diners, big appetites
Although Thelen and Frost originally built Beli for millennial diners, Gen Z quickly became the app’s largest audience. Most of Beli’s users are 35 and younger, Frost said, and those younger diners connect deeply with Beli’s social approach to food.
“When we started building, Eliot and I are not Gen Z, and we thought we were building for us millennials,” Thelen said. “We quickly found that the problem was just as big, if not bigger, with Gen Z.”
The social focus resonates with Chan, who has posted the second-most restaurant notes on Beli in the Sacramento area, according to Beli’s local leaderboard. Chan said the app fits seamlessly with how younger diners already share food experiences online.
“When Beli was first shared with me, I was like, ‘Oh, this is everything I kind of wanted Yelp to be.’ It’s more customizable and feels personal,” Chan said.
Beli feels like a “personal repository” for her experiences rather than a platform for competition, Chan said. She jots down what she loves about a place, filters by location and keeps track of future posts in a format she likened to a mobile-first version of workplace organizing app Notion.
Chan said Beli’s ranking system makes logging meals and restaurants more enjoyable. As a longtime Yelp user, she enjoys the fresh take Beli provides.
“I was Yelp Elite for eight years and I loved sharing what I found,” Chan said. “But eventually, it felt stressful; you can’t always be honest when the business gives you free food, and the reviews just get messy. Beli takes all of that pressure away.”
Taste and trust
Thelen said the hope for Beli is that it becomes a trusted network built on genuine recommendations. Frost agrees and added that food is often about more than just the meal.
“Dining is inherently social,” Frost said. “Beli just helps people capture that.”
In Sacramento’s tight-knit and up-and-coming food scene, Beli’s model may fit right in.
“This city thrives on sharing,” Barnum-Dann said. “An app that makes that easier? That’s only going to help this community grow.”
Chris Woodard is a Sacramento-based freelance journalist.