Deciding where to eat should be easy. Yet it often becomes frustrating when searching through written reviews, photos, and restaurant listings.
Most websites and apps show ratings and written opinions from strangers, but they rarely answer the question that people really care about: Would someone I trust recommend this place?
Food is a sensory experience, and the best way to capture that experience today is through video. That idea is what inspired us to build WhattaEat.
WhattaEat is a platform where people discover restaurants through short, authentic food videos shared by real diners.
Before I get into the reason of why we built WhattaEat, lets look at how people currently discover restaurants.
The Problem with Traditional Restaurant Reviews
Many restaurant discovery apps rely heavily on written reviews and star ratings. Those features can be helpful, but they often provides a limited view of the dining experience.
Food triggers many of your senses. It needs a better medium to showcase the restaurants and dishes. Imagine watching a plate of tacos being served, hearing the sizzle of fajitas, and seeing the atmosphere of the restaurant.
Written reviews and photos struggle to capture that experience.
- Photos may not represent the food quality
- Difficult to visualize the dining experience
The Rise of Short-Form Food Videos
Over the years, short-form videos have become one of the most popular ways for people to discover new restaurants and dishes. Many short-video platforms already allow food creators to share content with millions of people. However, those platforms are not designed to help people actively decide where to eat.
There is a growing trend of Gen Z discovering restaurants through short-form videos rather than traditional search engines or written reviews. Those platforms help people discover food, but they are not designed for someone actively deciding where to eat nearby. This can make it difficult to find the restaurants shown in the videos.
Discovering Food Through Video
Food videos allow people to preview the dining experience before visiting a restaurant instead of relying on reading reviews.
Short videos can quickly show things that written reviews or photos often miss, such as:
- The portion sizes of dishes
- The atmosphere inside the restaurant
- What people are actually ordering
- How the food is prepared
Seeing all those details helps a person quickly and confidently decide where to eat.
The Power of Word of Mouth
One of the strongest ways people decide to eat is through recommendations. Friends, family, and coworkers often share their favorite restaurants through conversations, text messages, photos, or social media.
People often trust recommendations from people they know, but most platforms don’t show which restaurants your friends or trusted creators recommend.
People often discover restaurants through:
- Friends recommending a place to eat
- Seeing food on social media
- Watching a food creator show or review the dish
How WhattaEat Works
WhattaEat simplifies food discovery by combining short-form food videos, social sharing, and restaurant discovery into one platform.
With WhattaEat, people can:
- Watch short videos of creators sharing food
- Share dishes or restaurants
- Save restaurants for later
Learning From Our First Attempt
This wasn’t the first time we tried to build an app to help people decide where to eat, an earlier version started in 2021.
It was a simpler app that helped people choose restaurants by swiping through cards featuring different places.
While the idea helped with decision-making, it lacked the social and visual elements that make food discovery exciting today.
We were not operating as a startup at the time and Jose was originally a client of Luis who developed the first version of the app. For a few years Jose promoted the app, but struggled to gain traction.
Jose later reconnected with Luis in 2025 to explore how the idea could evolve into something more social and engaging.
Luis had previously built and exited ShredSpots in late 2021, a skateboard spot discovery app that helped skaters find places to skate around the world. His experience showed how powerful location-based discovery platforms could be when built around a passionate community.
Together they decided to rebuild the original idea and transform it into a startup. Instead of a swipe-based decision app, they pivoted toward a video-first platform focused on food discovery.
The core mission remained the same: making it easier for people to decide what to eat. Even the name stayed: WhattaEat, a play on the phrase “What to Eat.”
The new version of WhattaEat focuses on food discovery through community sharing and short-form videos. Since relaunching the platform, we’ve started seeing more positive feedback and more people using the app.
Helping Local Food Vendors Get Discovered
A realization while building WhattaEat was that many small local food vendors do not receive the visibility they deserve. Some of the best food experiences come from small restaurants, food trucks, and neighborhood vendors. Many people haven’t heard of them unless it was personally recommended. Many rely purely on word of mouth and have no simple way to share their location online.
A food cart vendor can show their food with a video, set their live location for people to easily find them. We wanted to make it easier to find these local vendors easily on a map and help increase their visitors and uplift their business.
The Evolution of Food Discovery
The way people discover places, products, and experiences has shifted dramatically to video and social recommendations over the years. Food discovery is beginning to follow the same trend. People are increasingly discovering restaurants through video rather than written reviews or static photos.
We believe food discovery is evolving toward platforms that show fuller experiences by combining video, community, and map locations.
Built in Southern California
WhattaEat was founded in Southern California by two Latino entrepreneurs Luis Calvillo, a founder who previously exited the skateboarding discovery app ShredSpots, and Jose Acevedo.
SoCal is one of the most diverse food regions in the world. From street tacos and food trucks to Chinese cuisine, fine dining, and neighborhood favorites.
Living in SoCal exposed us to how rich and diverse the local food scene truly is. It also showed us how difficult it can be to discover these hidden food spots unless someone personally recommends them. WhattaEat was built to make those discoveries easier.
The Future of WhattaEat
WhattaEat is still early. We do believe the future of food discovery should be more community-based, more local, and more visual. As more people share food experiences through videos, the platforms that connect creators, diners, and restaurants will play a more important role in helping people decide where to eat.
Our goal is to continue improving WhattaEat to make discovering authentic food easier and faster for everyone.