TikTok is building restaurant discovery into the app. The new “Must Eat” hub is only available in NYC, LA, and the Bay Area right now, but it uses tons of content (40M posts, to be exact) to create a sortable restaurant guide. Like on Yelp, users can find the cuisine they want, leave reviews, bookmark spots, and even make reservations. As it has with everything else, user-generated content democratizes food criticism, making any foodie with a phone the next authority on where to eat and influencing what’s added to menus. This is far from the first time TikTok has made a feature to centralize what users search for most; they’ve previously made Reviews for businesses and TikTok Go for booking travel. And because food is such a huge content category, it should really be no surprise this is next. After all, TikTok says 27M diners ate somewhere new in the last year because of TikTok in the U.S. alone. (The Verge)
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