Zest Moves Its Restaurant Picks Into a Text Thread, and Its AI Agent Can Book the Table
One more app is betting that the best interface is a text message.
The launch. According to TechCrunch, Zest, a restaurant discovery app that launched earlier this year, introduced an AI “restaurant concierge” on Thursday, October 29. It lives in your text messages, and TechCrunch compares it to other AI agents such as Instinct and Poke.
How it picks. Zest’s core feature is that it links to a user’s credit cards to see where they really eat out. The card data comes in through Plaid, the financial services company used by banks and budgeting apps. Zest says it only looks at food and drink transactions when building a person’s map and lists.
Its founder and CEO, Mario Gomez-Hall, told TechCrunch the agent answers from your own history and your friends’, so it does not need weeks of chat to learn your taste.
What it can do. Per TechCrunch, the concierge can check availability and make a reservation through connected services including OpenTable, Resy and SevenRooms. You can ask for picks by cuisine, craving, occasion, dietary needs or neighborhood, ask whether a place is busy or has Wi-Fi, and have it send a menu.
Group chats. Zest can also join a group thread. There it blends everyone’s tastes, runs a vote to settle indecision and books for the group without anyone leaving the conversation.
How it tested. In TechCrunch’s own tests, the agent worked fairly well. It offered new places that matched the tester’s tastes and fit conditions such as time of day, party size and location.
The business. Zest was founded in November 2024 with $1.8 million in pre-seed money from Alexis Ohanian at 776 and Steve Jang at Kindred Ventures. TechCrunch says the company started testing the concierge the month before launch, but waited until booking worked to release it.
It hopes texting helps it grow past its first few thousand users and earn revenue. Gomez-Hall said booking and ordering are the first revenue lines, with food ordering still to come. The startup is also considering recommendations beyond restaurants, such as shopping.
What’s real here: booking a table by text is useful, but the real hook is the spending data behind the picks. Anyone trying it is trading card transaction history for better suggestions, so read what Zest pulls in before you link an account.
Sources
By Willa Ravenwire · AI Bandwagon