Introducing The Inside Scoop

The app that tells you what to order at any restaurant

POV: After months of trying to secure a reservation, you’re finally dining at the city’s hottest restaurant. The one everyone’s been talking about. You sit down, open the menu. Thirty-plus items. What should you order? What are the must-try dishes? Don’t mess this up!

We’ve all been there. Glancing at other tables to see what looks good. Trying to recall what some influencer said was a “10 out of 10”. But when it comes time to order, you’re stuck.

That’s why I built The Inside Scoop — a dining intelligence web app that tells you what to order at any restaurant. Unlike Google Maps and Yelp, which focus on where to eat, The Inside Scoop focuses on what to order once you’re there.

You can check it out at insidescoop.co — it’s free to use.

Why I built it

I love trying new restaurants and I want to order the best of what they have to offer, even if it’s something I wouldn’t normally pick. Maybe it’s octopus (not usually my thing) or the fries (something you can get anywhere). But if a restaurant is known for it, I want to try it.

Sure, I could ask the waiter for recommendations, watch TikTok videos, or scroll through Yelp reviews. But it’s hard to know who to trust. Is the waiter recommending something the kitchen is trying to move? Is the influencer being paid to promote the restaurant? Are the reviews I’m reading even relevant and up to date?

Ultimately, as a first-time diner at a restaurant, I just want to order the hits — what the restaurant does best. That’s what all this research is trying to surface anyway. The Inside Scoop gets there faster by analyzing what dozens of actual diners from the past year liked and disliked. It’s the modern-day take on “I’ll have what they’re having.”

How it works

You’re at the restaurant, looking at the menu. Open The Inside Scoop on your phone. The app shows you the 20 closest restaurants that are currently open — so the place you’re at should be right there. Tap on it.

In about 30 seconds, you get a concise report based on the 50 most recent Google reviews from the past year:

• The basics: Type of cuisine, dining style, price range and Google rating. Expand to see more details like hours, phone and website.

• What to order: 4 to 8 dishes other diners recommended, with quotes from their reviews

• Inside Scoop: Tips and advice that only regulars would know

• Ask a Question: An AI-powered chatbot to ask questions about the restaurant

Real-world examples

Dining at Chantecler, the app highlighted their steak tartare. Lots of places have this dish, so it’s easy to skip. But I made sure to order it after the report praised it as “one of the best in the city.”

At Dailo, it recommended the “Big Mac Bao” which wasn’t listed on the menu but was available on request.

And at Mother Tongue, the app steered me towards ordering their Kamayan Feast, a traditional Filipino communal meal served on banana leaves and eaten by hand.

The backstory

I originally built The Inside Scoop in 2023 during Dan Shipper’s How to Build a Chatbot course. It worked, but I had to manually scrape reviews for each restaurant and add them to the database, which wasn’t practical.

In 2024, AI tools like Bolt.new made it easy to integrate directly with Google Places, Apify, and OpenAI, and I could finally build something that worked in real-time.

For the past year, I’ve been using The Inside Scoop every time I dined out, and now I’m sharing it with you.

Try it out

The next time you find yourself staring at a menu and wondering what to order, give it a try.

I’d love to hear what you think!