Every “best birria in LA” video and “is this NYC spot worth the hype” comment section now has a second job. On Wednesday TikTok launched Must Eat, a restaurant guide inside the app built from more than 40 million posts, reviews and comments about food on the platform.
It’s live now in New York City, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, on the U.S. version of the app only.
Each city gets two lists, “Everyday Eats” for neighborhood spots and “Elevated Dining” for special occasions. You can filter by cuisine, price, distance and hours. Every restaurant has its own page that pulls in the TikToks made about it, along with a map, reviews from users and, at select spots, OpenTable reservations without leaving the app. Golden Diner, Semma and Via Carota were among the New York picks, according to The Verge.
Yelp was built on people writing paragraphs about their dinner. Google Maps runs on star ratings. TikTok’s version runs on the food videos creators have been making for years, now organized into something you can search, filter and book from. It’s part of TikTok GO, the booking layer the company launched earlier this year so creators could tag hotels, attractions and tours viewers can reserve.
TikTok says no restaurant can pay to be featured, and every listing is checked to confirm the business is open and in good standing. That promise covers the list. It doesn’t cover the videos the list learns from, and paid creator partnerships are a regular part of food TikTok. The announcement doesn’t say how sponsored posts factor into the rankings, or whether the creators whose videos fill the guide get anything beyond extra views.
TikTok says 27 million Americans visited an independent restaurant, cafe or shop for the first time last year after discovering it on the app, spending an estimated $4.7 billion, and that more than 13 million picked a local restaurant over a chain because of something they saw there.
Independent restaurants with a strong TikTok following are the clearest winners, along with the food creators whose videos now link straight to a reservation.
ADVERTISEMENT
Restaurants that never went viral may find the new guide harder to get into than Yelp ever was.
