Meet Tell, The Social Restaurant Recommendation App That Wants To Be "The Best Food Map Ever"

If you're heading out for dinner and are looking for a dependable restaurant, who do you turn to? Yelp? Foursquare? Those options weren't good enough for entrepreneur Joshua Henner, so he created his own.

"We just didn't trust sources like Yelp and Foursquare, because they're just location-based," he told us. But it's not the location that matters; it's the source of the recommendation." Enter Tell, a new app that only gives you restaurant and bar recommendations from people and publications you trust.

Here's how it works: You sign up for the app, track down your friends or an ever-growing list of influencers like Scott Conant, Geoffrey Zakarian, Carla Hall, or Vice Munchies (as well as plenty of other food publications, tastemakers, chefs, restaurateurs, and bloggers), and you'll only see locations recommended by the people you follow. You can also create your own food map to share with people who follow you. At the end of the day, instead of seeing a seemingly infinite list of restaurants to choose from with no real guarantee that they're good or not, you'll only get recommendations from trusted sources of your own choosing.

The app has been in development for more than a year, and is launching in New York and Los Angeles with publications like Eater, The Michelin Guide, TimeOut, Grub Street, and The Brunch Boys already on board. Along with just recommending restaurants, Tell has also started partnering with food and beverage companies (like Ilegal Mezcal) to offer specials, exclusive events, concerts, and discounts, and there are plenty of other surprises and new initiatives already lined up.

So download the app and give it a shot; it's only going to continue to improve as more and more people sign up. It's really a no-brainer: If you can tap into a network of friends and influencers for restaurant and bar recommendations, why wouldn't you?