TikTok turns viral food finds into a restaurant guide

TikTok has introduced Must Eat, an in-app restaurant guide that turns the platform’s food chatter into a more usable way to choose where to dine. Launching in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, it gathers recommendations and curated lists drawn from more than 40 million posts and comments, then lets people browse by city or filter by cuisine, price, rating, and location. The guide separates casual neighborhood picks from special-occasion dining, and some restaurants can be booked through OpenTable without leaving TikTok. The important shift is that TikTok is no longer just where a restaurant becomes viral; it is trying to own the next step—comparison and booking—putting it more directly against Yelp and Google Maps.