The Best Food App in the World
Da Zhong Dian Ping
The most used food app in the world, for good reason.
A long, long time ago there was a world without the internet. A time when restaurant marketing was not yet an industry; when we took a chance on a new place without knowing anything about it. If we were in a new part of town, we were stabbing in the dark. A restaurant, over time, lived and died on its word-of-mouth. Friends and colleagues would tell us about the best restaurants, and we’d happily share our favourites too.
Fast-forward to modern day, and the landscape is very different. If we find ourselves in a new city we pull out our phones and go straight to Google Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor, or in China, Da Zhong Dian Ping.
Da Zhong Dian Ping is Yelp if every single American used it, wrote reviews after every meal, posted thousands of videos and pictures of the food, decor and menu, and of course, scored. It stands miles apart from its Western counterparts, with every piece of information about a restaurant you could possibly need: up-to-date menus, prices, best-selling items, as well as deals and offers. It’s the way Yelp or TripAdvisor is supposed to work, but China has figured it out*.
I’ve discovered hundreds of new restaurants through the app. I browse reviews and pictures on the homepage, kind of like a food-only Instagram. I’d genuinely be lost without it, even in my home-base of Beijing. Everyone describes China as ;convenient’; it’s thanks to apps like Da Zhong Dian Ping that the country can proudly take that medal (restaurant listings in only the beginning of what this monster app can do - I order food delivery, book cinema tickets and even book hotels).
However, like all social media apps, there is an darker side that’s frustrating for restaurants to manage. If all restaurants start off equal, it quickly skews as they fall into an 80/20 pattern. As a restaurant starts to receive positive reviews, it becomes, naturally, more popular. As a result, it receives even more positive reviews and moves up and up and up the rankings. The app’s algorithm is more likely to recommend excellent restaurants to users so they’ll trust it. As a result, good restaurants end up struggling and losing out to great ones.
The physical manifestation of this is huge queues for a few places around the city. In 2020 there was a pretty nice Korean restaurant where friends and I used to go a few times a month in Dongzhimen, Beijing. The owner starting asking customers to write a review on the app, which we were all happy to do. Within a year it was impossible to get a table. The crowds had flocked. It was now listed as the number one Korean restaurant in the area - good for them.
User Review on the App
Vinegar-Soaked Eggplant in a restaurant in Beijing.
A short drive up the road are other great Korean restaurants - much further down the rankings, with no queue, empty tables and all struggling because they are the number 3 or number 7 slot on Da Zhong Dian Ping. Great restaurants fall off the radar. No one wants to take their friends to the number 3 best Korean restaurant; they want the first. The app has tapped into the insecurities of customers - they believe that there is such a thing as ‘the best’ Korean restaurant and they want to be a part of it. They don’t want to be the losers dining at number 3; it’s as if they were not ‘in the know’.
The result is, as Richard Koch calls it, the winner-take-all effect. Instead of the an 80/20 principle, apps like Da Zhong Dian Ping force an extreme: 1% of restaurants take 99% of customers. This may not be exactly where we are today, but if a popular restaurant can keep up with demand and keep expanding, they will dominate the entire restaurant scene of a city, squeezing out all other competition until we’re left with a dull and soulless restaurant scene.
It’s a tricky issue. Most restaurants rely solely on Da Zhong Dian Ping for marketing, but it is a battleground where tiny hole-in-the-walls fight against the behemoths of China. The latter can throw money into marketing, the former has forty customers a day - which one has better food? We have to get off the app and try both for ourselves.
*A slight caveat: I haven’t used Trip Advisor since 2015, so it may well have improved. We relied on it a lot when I was managing restaurants in the UK, but it was clunky to use, and mostly filled with reviewers moaning about one thing or another, and taking blurring pictures of food.