This New App Will Make All of Your Foodie Dreams Come True

We've all been there: It's Friday night, and you're simultaneously scouring the pages of Yelp, OpenTable, and Foursquare for not just any restaurant, but the best new restaurant in town. You opentab upon tab until your desktop screen (or, more likely, your iPhone) is littered with a surplus of reviews, prompting you to deftly sift through each one until you finally land on what seems like a winning option. By that time, of course, you're a few swipes from succumbing to the temptations of Seamless. You think to yourself, "Wouldn't it be great if there was something that aggregated all of these reviews into one screen?"

Enter Rekky. The new app culls top restaurant check-ins and tips from users' Instagram, Facebook, and Foursquare accounts to provide recommendations ("rekkies") vetted by various influencers, including Harley Viera-Newton (photo at top and below), Leigh Lezark and Geordon Nicol of The Misshapes, and Danielle and Laura Kosann of The New Potato, to name a few. For founder and self-professed foodie Muhammad Saigol, Rekky was borne out of personal frustration. "Your friends tag places on Instagram, and you think, 'That looks cool,' but there's no proper way to search for it," he says. "Why not bring together where your friends will be, as well as your favorite tastemakers, and have the functionality to search for those places on a map, and by category? It solves what would otherwise be a very tedious process."

In addition to supplying general recs, each tastemaker creates personalized lists of their favorite spots, displayed in the "Lists" section of the app. The "Discover" tab lets users see what places are trending near them, and Instagram-like snaps at each venue offer an honest depiction of the menu offerings. Adds Viera-Newton, "If you may not normally go in, you're more likely to go because you have someone else you trust vouching for it." While the app is currently N.Y.C.-only, we're keeping our fingers crossed that it expands soon.

Download Rekky for free on the iTunes Store.