In recent years the world of restaurant prescription has taken a 180 degree turn. Of the almighty critic of newspaper or magazine, whose subjective opinion could ruin any business overnight, we have moved to an ecosystem of social networks and forums where users are the ones who elevate or condemn a restaurant.
Although today there are hundreds of options to choose from where to go for dinner on a weekend –including the recommendations on this your friend page–, it is easy to get lost among so much information.
For David Martin and Alexandra Papadopoulos, a couple of self-confessed gourmets who met working at Telefónica, choosing a restaurant had become an increasingly difficult task.
“We could not find a selection of well-curated restaurants where it was easy to search, ”explains Martín who, given his experience in application development, thought he could do something better than there was.
The restaurants are selected by the Velada team and renowned food critics
“It occurred to me use the Tinder paradigm “, aim. And Velada was born.
The idea is very simple: you select one of the cities in which the service is available –at the moment Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga or Marbella–, some search criteria, and the application shows you restaurants randomly in the form of tokens, which you can go through as in the famous dating app.
These restaurants are selected by the Velada team itself and, in addition, by renowned gastronomic critics such as Philippe Regol, that you have chosen your favorite restaurants in Barcelona, or Carlos Mateos (Mr. Espeto), who has done the same in Malaga and Marbella.
A one-way app
In a world, that of apps, where interaction with the user is almost mandatory, Velada is committed to a one-way service.
“The issue of comments and scores is prostituted,” says Martín. “There is a lot of fraud, both Google and TripAdvisor a lot of comments are deleted. We have lists of restaurants curated by expert people. We want to make life easier for people in the sector and, if you enter Velada, it will be good: there will be no bad places or with bad service ”.
Very little information is offered in the tabs beyond the practical data: a few photos and the most outstanding dishes. There is nothing like a food review, we will have to look outside if we need more details.
Since its premiere in spring 2020, Velada has accumulated more than 25,000 users and it is on its way to surpass a million swipes. “Or what is the same, the restaurants of our app they have been seen more than 1 million times ”, explains Martín. “Evening is consolidating As one of the most used restaurant apps in Spain, at the end of this month we ranked 8th in the AppStore in the category of food & drink. This is crazy if we take into account that the rest of the apps that are in the top 10 are multinational companies that invest millions of euros in marketing”
For now, the main objective of the startup it is add more cities to the service. Malaga and Marbella were released at the beginning of summer, after Madrid and Barcelona, and their founders are committed to continuing with Valencia, the Basque Country, the islands, Seville …
They also want to add a geolocation service Tell you which of the recommended restaurants are near you or in a specific area, something that is immediately missing given how accustomed we are to it. But it is a function that its creators have wanted to incorporate belatedly in a conscious way: “Our intention with the app is the discovery, it is that you go through and see that [los restaurantes] they look great”.
Our experience
So far everything that Velada has to offer us but Is the application worth downloading? Yes, although after trying Velada for a few weeks we have mixed feelings.
All the interesting neighborhood sites or that simply do not usually appear in the guides are left out
The idea is a good one, no doubt, and can be used to get to know new places or that you did not remember what you wanted to visit. For me, the great failure is precisely the determination of its creators to leave out “the typical place that has some shitty prawns but where the floor is full of napkins.”
In Madrid, the city whose gastronomic panorama I know most closely, the sites that almost all the media have already talked about appear, mostly in the city center. All the interesting neighborhood sites or that simply do not usually appear in the guides are left out. The type of sites that would be interesting to find in an application like this.
Asked about this absence, Martín insists that, for the moment, it is appropriate: “For now the most popular bars are left out”, although we do believe that these very neighborhood taverns have value, but right now we are not going to add them because we are not able to differentiate them well, and we do not want a Michelin star to appear next to this “.
The problem is that, in my opinion, no discovery in a Michelin star, which already comes out for something in the famous French guide. If the application was born so that people know new places, I would encourage them to bet on looking for establishments off the radar.
The most interesting thing about Velada is, perhaps, using it when visiting cities that you don’t know so well. Although I have gone to eat at almost all the places that are recommended in Madrid, I do not know many of those that appear in the selection of Barcelona or Malaga. AND I trust the selection of people like Regol or Mateos 1,000 times more than Tripadvisor users vote. A selection that, although it can be found in their respective blogs and media, is much easier to consult via app.
It is also interesting that Velada members bet on a business model that allows them to continue selecting restaurants without interference: “We decided not to charge for reservations because it is much more difficult to scale. You have to negotiate with each restaurant, and being a guide we would have to add to any restaurant that pays. We don’t want to do this. Only restaurants visited by us or our collaborators leave. We have to earn money in some way and it will be by charging brands in sponsorships and advertising when we have a large community ”.
Good luck.
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