In 2020, Judy Thelen and Eliot Frost created Beli, an app that allows you to rank restaurants you’ve been to. Activity tracking apps such as Letterboxd and Strava have exploded in recent years, but Beli has something a little different from them all: Leaderboards based on your location. The number of restaurants you’ve visited in your life is quantified and ranked against others in your city or against your friends. What’s more, there are individual leaderboards for universities, so you can finally confirm who has the most refined palette on campus. Currently, on the overall ranking board, McGill ranks 44th amongst all participating schools, with NYU dominating at first place.
The Tribune talked to three high-ranking Beli users at McGill to understand what they love about food, the app, and, of course, being really good at eating.
Ella Waxman, BA’ 24, is the number one user in the McGill circuit and Montreal, with almost 1000 restaurants logged on her account. Waxman shared how she first got involved with the platform.
“I started using Beli two and a half years ago when my friend introduced me to it,” she explained to The Tribune. “Initially, it was a competition between us two, but I’ve been grateful to grow up on the periphery of the food industry—my dad used to design menus for restaurants, and then I worked in a couple bars and designed a couple cocktails so I’ve always loved everything food-related.”
However, Waxman stated that her logging activities began long before Beli’s inception, where her reviews took a more traditional character.
“Back in the day, I got into Foursquare, and I used to become a mayor of a place on Foursquare, so I definitely started going to places and ranking them before the existence of Beli.”
Foursquare, an online city guide that showed places to eat, drink, shop, or visit based on insights from fellow users or local experts, shut down its app in 2024. On it, users could follow other people, suggest new places to visit, post reviews, offer insider tips and ‘check in’ to the app when visiting a venue. A “mayor” in Foursquare was a person who checked into a place the most.
Kasen Korstanje, U2 Arts and one of the top 10 users at McGill, wrote to The Tribune about how Beli has helped him think more critically about food.
“Trying new food doesn’t only open you up to a whole world within food, but I think it connects you with everything around you,” he wrote. “The memories associated with food are super powerful, and trying new foods makes space for more memories to be made and more possibilities to reach back to the past and remember life through food.”
On a similar note, Waxman echoed the importance of using the app to stay in touch with friends.
“Starting at a young age, connecting over food was always a huge deal because of my upbringing. Getting to share that part on an app—now that I’m living away from home, I can see what my friends are up to and connect with them.”
Finally, each interviewee shared their opinions on Beli’s leaderboard system. Waxman confessed that her competitive nature fuels her logging.
“I’ve always been a very competitive person; whether it’s extracurricular, academic, professional—it motivates me. Currently, I’m the number one user in Montreal, I think for over a year now, and around 780th in the world,” she said.
Korstanje, on the other hand, did not feel as intensely and shared he instead uses Beli as a source of inspiration for what restaurant to try next.
“I love looking at everyone on the McGill leaderboard and getting inspo for where to go out and eat next,” he wrote. “For me, trying new restaurants is like a movie buff going to the movie theatre or an artist going to a gallery. It’s a way to get exposed to a form of creativity and expression. The food world is full of thinkers, creatives, and people pushing the boundaries of what food can be.”
