TikTok takes a bite out of Yelp with restaurant guide launching in LA, Bay Area

After flooding your feed with influencers, TikTok wants to feed you.

The tech giant announced the launch Must-Eat, a new “community-powered” guide to help users find local restaurants in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and New York City.

According to TikTok, 27 million Americans visited an independent restaurant, cafe, or shop after seeing it first on the app, generating around $4.7 billion in local spending.

The new guide will split recommendations into two categories: Everyday Eats, which will recommend casual spots, and Elevating Dining, covering more upscale restaurants for special occasions.

To find the perfect spot, users can search by cuisine type, price point, score, and location. The guide will allow you to book reservations through OpenTable, directly on the TikTok app.

Users in New York, LA, and the Bay Area can find MustEat by simply searching “Must Eat” on the app.

The guide also allows users to save restaurants to their TikTok collections and create their own list of restaurants they’d like to visit.

LA restauranteurs have thrown their support behind the new guide.

“For over 40 years, our family’s restaurant grew through word of mouth. TikTok has taken that to a whole new level, introducing our grandfather’s food to a diverse generation of new customers,” Justin Johnson and Jessica Bane, co-Owners of The Serving Spoon in Inglewood said in a press release.

“Seeing young people walk through our doors excited to try the dishes we grew up on means everything to our family.”

With the new service, TikTok hopes to compete with other, more established apps for food recommendations, including Beli, which boasts over 75 million restaurant ratings across 30,000 cities. 80% of the platform’s users are under 35, the company revealed last year.

Synonymous with restaurant ratings, business rating platform Yelp has over 300 million reviews and receives 76 million monthly visits to its website.

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