The best guide to any city is your group chat

Where this started

We live the way most people our age live: nobody we know opens a review site to decide where to go. You screenshot a TikTok and lose it in your camera roll. You ask the same three friends where to eat, again. Someone in the group chat always knows the spot — but none of that knowledge lives anywhere. It's the best city guide ever written, and it's trapped in a chat thread.

Meanwhile the apps that are built for finding places run on ratings from strangers. A 4.3-star average isn't a recommendation — it's an average of people whose taste you know nothing about. Your friends aren't writing reviews there, and honestly, neither are you.

Discovery already moved to the people we trust. The tools just never caught up. So we're building the one that does.

What Tastes is

Tastes is a social discovery app for restaurants, cafés, bars, clubs and everything else worth leaving the house for. Instead of a wall of anonymous stars, you get a feed and a live map of where the people you follow have actually been — friends, and local creators whose taste matches yours.

And here's the part we care about most: you don't just rate the venue, you rate the dishes. Nobody goes to a restaurant — you go for the pasta, the matcha, the negroni. Rating at that level is how a recommendation gets specific enough to actually trust, and it's what we're building toward: an app that can tell you "you loved the pesto there — you'll love this place" in any city you land in.

We're also unashamed about making it fun. Badges, levels, city leaderboards, a profile that shows off your taste. Going out is one of the most joyful things people do — the app that helps you do it shouldn't feel like filing paperwork.

What we believe

• Every opinion belongs to someone. No anonymous stars — a review on Tastes is tied to a real person with real taste.
• Recommendations are earned, never bought. Venues can't pay to appear in your feed or on your map. Not now, not ever.
• Taste is personal, not average. We build for the specific — this dish, this person, this night.
• Real world over screen time. The point isn't to keep you scrolling. It's to get you out the door and into the place.

Where we're going

Tastes is built by two friends who lived this problem and got tired of waiting for someone else to solve it. We're launching city by city, starting with London, Madrid and Paris — and early access is invite-based, so each city opens with a founding crew of local tasters who set the bar.

Join the waitlist to be first when we reach your city — especially if you're the person your group chat already asks.

Tastes · contact@tastesapp.com