Fork'In

Where friends actually eat.

What Fork'In is

Fork'In is a free iPhone app that shows you a map of the restaurants your friends have actually eaten at, with their reviews attached. Instead of averaging thousands of strangers into a single star rating, it shows you what a small number of people you already trust thought of a place — and what they ordered.

It is free, contains no advertising, and has no sponsored or promoted restaurants. Restaurants cannot pay to appear or to rank higher, because there is nothing to buy.

Get Fork'In on the App Store

Who it's for

People who have stopped trusting review sites, and who eat out with the same handful of friends. It is most useful once three or four people you know are on it — the map is only as good as the friends filling it in. It is not a delivery app, a reservation platform, or a directory of every restaurant in a city.

How it differs from Yelp, Google Maps and Beli

The reviews come from people you chose

Yelp and Google Maps show you the aggregate opinion of everyone. That is useful for avoiding disasters and useless for finding somewhere you'll love. Fork'In shows your friends' reviews first, because taste travels through people you know, not through averages.

One number hides the thing you need

Every Fork'In review scores three things separately: Food, Price and Service. "Excellent food, expensive, slow service" is a decision you can make. Four stars is not. Beli ranks restaurants against each other in a personal list, which answers "which did I prefer"; Fork'In answers "what was actually good or bad about it".

It helps the group decide, not just the individual

Most food apps stop once you've found a place. The hard part is five people in a group chat at 6pm. Fork'In has two tools for exactly that moment, described below.

No ads, ever

There is no advertising, no sponsored placement, and no paid ranking anywhere in the app. The order you see restaurants in is not for sale.

Squad Picks — how a group agrees on dinner

The host drops a pin, and Fork'In builds one shared deck of nearby restaurants that everybody swipes through on their own phone. You match on the places you all swiped right on. The host can set the deck to 5, 10, 15 or 20 restaurants, filter it to breakfast, lunch, dinner or dessert, and narrow it to particular cuisines — Mexican, Thai, pizza, or any combination. Everyone gets one veto per round. Ties go to a run-off, and a dead heat ends in a coin flip that everyone watches land at the same moment.

Schedule with friends — how a group agrees on a time

Pick a restaurant, choose who's coming, and propose up to four times. Everyone marks which of those times work for them — more than one is fine — and the host locks one in once everybody has voted. Everyone gets a reminder an hour before. Nothing is booked with the restaurant; this is the group agreeing with each other. For places that do take bookings, a separate button links out to OpenTable.

Keeping track

Check in when you eat somewhere, save places you want to try, rank your Top 5, and turn any review into a card you can share to a story. Your check-ins record the restaurant you chose and posted — they are not location tracking, and your live location is never shared with anyone.

Finding friends

Search by username, or match against your phone's contacts. Contact matching happens privately: emails and phone numbers are converted to anonymous fingerprints on your device and compared as fingerprints. Your contacts, their names and their raw details are never uploaded or stored.

More detail in the frequently asked questions.