Eater launched an app today

...and I have questions for editor-in-chief Steph Wu.

screenshots courtesy of Eater

Eater has a new iPhone app. 

“This has been a dream of mine for so long, to have an Eater app that shows you every single Eater-recommended restaurant near you,” Eater editor-in-chief Steph Wu wrote me in an email sharing the news.

The app does display every single Eater-recommended restaurant near you, and in a host of other cities, easily navigable via drop-down. It pulls info from all of Eater’s local maps (like this one) — hotspots, recommendations in different food categories, new openings — and combines them into one searchable map. Listings link to restaurant websites and, in some cases, reservations services for quick booking. 

I haven’t written about a new app in… a long time. But I did write about one just like this in the first months of my first restaurant technology newsletter. Eater launched an app on iOS and Android over 10 years ago, in June 2013. It featured essentially the same functionality as today’s app, albeit with far less content running on a more primitive iOS 5 operating system. For context, Apple recently released iOS 18. (I don’t actually know what happened to that app. I think Eater just… stopped updating it.)

I remember, because I was mere weeks into my first restaurant technology newsletter. My coverage then, still strangely relevant, proclaimed: “Eater’s (finally) got a brand new app.”

Then, the site was a blog and the posts were brief and chatty, an affront to glossy magazine fussiness. Now, Eater’s a legacy media outlet facing a new set of challenges. Parent company Vox Media has invested heavily into a network of podcasts helmed by influencers and subject experts, including notable food-world names Francis Lam and Jesse Sparks. It cut a deal with generative artificial intelligence company OpenAI, allowing its content to be used to train models and shared inside the app. At the same time, restaurant industry influencers dominate social media, and their reviews and recommendations can make or break a business in under thirty seconds. The landscape is evolving, and the pace of change is speeding up. 

Sponsors Capital One and SevenRooms signed on to the launch in what feels like a fairly straightforward monetization opportunity for content that Eater’s been producing for years. (I appreciated Wu’s straight talk about this in our interview. She said of the sponsors, “​​When it comes to helping people discover restaurants, they have the same mission as we do. They just have theoretically bigger budgets to help make that happen.”)

The new app, thrust into the fray today, has lots of company. During our interview, Wu called it a “restaurant discovery app,” which makes it a competitor to some of the apps that get the most attention on my phone: Google Maps, Instagram, Yelp, even reservations platforms like OpenTable.  

Eater’s authoritative, trusted editorial will help it stand out, Wu told me.

Here’s the rest of our conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

Expedite: Congrats on the launch. Can you tell me more about it? 

Steph Wu, Eater: “This has been such a long time coming. It is the number-one request that we've gotten from readers who've known and loved Eater maps for as long as they've been around, which is actually almost 20 years.