Foodie? Chances are your friends are, too. Banking on that sense of community, particularly when it comes to cuisine, is a new app called Truffle. It’s branded as a “new kind of community bringing friends together to explore brilliant and unique dining experiences around the world.” And now, you can create that community for yourself.
Promising to blend the online restaurant review experience with the offline dining process, Truffle wants users to first use their phones, and then promptly get off them once they’ve found a place to break bread. And unlike other review sites, Truffle relies on your existing social circle for recommendations. After all, who knows your tastes better than your friends and family? By eliminating anonymous reviews and information overload, Truffle instead simply curates a list of recommended restaurants favorited by people you already trust.
“We do better when we have our friends involved in taste-based decisions, and we enjoy what we do more when our decisions are validated by our friends. Yet, we rarely get a glimpse of which places our friends might recommend on a day-to-day basis,” said Tom Limongello, Truffle’s co-founder & CEO. “Truffle makes it easy for people to enter their preferences for their favorite places and have those lists handy to message their friends.”
In addition to working with its users, Truffle is also collaborating with restaurants to help them more easily reach their frequent patrons, creating community dining experiences with select establishments in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco later this year.
“People have been coming together to break bread and share meals with friends for thousands of years,” added Truffle co-founder Jonathan Swerdlin. “Truffle taps into something very central to the human experience — eating together with people you care about — and makes it easy share and discover dining experiences with friends.”