Quick reality check on restaurant ratings in 2026:
- Estimates put 16–20% of reviews as fake.
- D Magazine documented Google Maps listings getting batched AI-generated 5-stars — "all 5 stars, never lower, arriving in batches."
- Dallas restaurants caught offering free drinks and 10% discounts in exchange for 5-star reviews.
- The effective scale on Google Maps is basically "3 to 5" — a 4.0 isn't meaningfully different from a 4.5.
Stranger reviews were never great signal — your taste isn't the average of a thousand randos. Now they're actively manipulated. Yelp's and Google's whole model relies on aggregate ratings, and that model is visibly breaking.
I've been building Tamelo as the opposite. The AI guide (Melo) ignores aggregate stranger reviews and learns from your own behavior instead.
The memory system — not a preference quiz.
Tamelo tracks over a dozen behavioral signals: categories you keep vs. pass, restaurants you keep vs. pass, places you save, places you visit, and post-meal feedback ("how was it?"). A background worker distills those into a profile with separate positive and negative memory:
- Avoids what you've shown you dislike — not just suggests what you like (most apps only track positive signals)
- Won't re-suggest somewhere you went last week
- Tells you why — "Because Melo noticed you lean toward Korean BBQ, and this fits that direction" — not a black-box "92% match"
- The loop closes after the meal — your "loved it" / "not for me" updates the profile
Your fifth session is meaningfully sharper than your first. No quiz, no settings page; it learns from what you actually do.
Group mode also dodges the crowd-average problem.
Group "where should we eat" apps usually make everyone swipe restaurants until they all match — public voting in disguise. In a friend group with different taste, that deadlocks or everyone settles for the chain place.
Tamelo flips it: each person privately writes a short letter (≤600 chars) to Melo about what they actually need tonight — comfort, dietary stuff, budget, vibe. Nobody else in the group sees what anyone wrote. Melo synthesizes the group's intent anonymously, factors in each person's taste memory, picks one restaurant, and explains the tradeoffs.
No swiping. No voting. No loud-friend bias.
Solo flow is food-first — you swipe cravings before restaurants, and categories adapt to weather and time of day.
Currently in beta. Real restaurant data (Google Places). Long-term plan is to expand the memory system into a broader taste profile, but right now we're focused on getting restaurants right first. Honest feedback very welcome — especially from anyone tired of trusting strangers' star ratings.
🌐 Landing: https://anyviaai.com/tamelo/
🍎 iOS (TestFlight): https://testflight.apple.com/join/AWrZv8dt
🤖 Android (Firebase beta): https://appdistribution.firebase.dev/i/80c01b19555eaa9a
(Founder, happy to answer anything in comments.)