Skip to content

Restaurant Rating App Beli Featured in Wall Street Journal

Social Sharing

05.09.2025

Charlotte Druckman

Wall Street Journal

The App That Makes Rating Restaurants Fun Again—and Gets Better the More You Use It

Judy Thelen and Eliot Frost met at their first job out of college. They’ve done everything together since, including going to business school, getting married and, nearly four years ago, launching Beli, the increasingly popular restaurant rating and list-keeping app.

“We’re at over 58 million ratings,” Thelen said. Users log on and rate restaurants all over the world. Thelen and Frost don’t track how many hours users spend engaging with their product, “because if you’re spending a lot of time in the app, you’re not going out and doing things in the real world,” she added. “Beli is supposed to help you eat.”

The more restaurants users rate, the more accurately the app’s algorithm can recommend others based on their preferences and connect them to users with similar taste. “We’ve gamified ranking,” Thelen said. And as the number of ratings for a spot grows, the more reliable—or democratic—Beli becomes overall.

Recently, they offered some insight into how they built the app and why it’s quickly becoming an indispensable tool to so many who love to dine out (or order in).

[Click here to continue reading]