Zest launches an AI agent that picks restaurants and books tables right in SMS

Restaurant discovery app Zest has introduced a “restaurant concierge” — an AI agent that works via text messages. It picks places based on the user’s card spending history, connected through Plaid, and can book tables via OpenTable, Resy and SevenRooms, including in a group chat.

Otabek YusupovFirst published on tafs uz 30 October 2026 at 23:532 min read

The key facts

Zest launched an AI concierge that works over SMS: recommendations and table booking without opening the app
The agent relies on card spending data imported via Plaid and only considers food and drink categories
Booking goes through OpenTable, Resy and SevenRooms; these are the startup’s first revenue sources

Recommendations and booking in a single chat

Zest, a startup behind a restaurant discovery app launched earlier this year, introduced a new feature on Thursday — a personal AI “restaurant concierge” that works inside text messages. The user texts the agent at (212) 470-6067 and receives a selection of places based on cuisine, occasion, dietary restrictions or neighborhood, and can also ask follow-up questions: how busy a venue is, whether it has Wi-Fi, the menu. The agent checks table availability and books through the connected services OpenTable, Resy and SevenRooms, TechCrunch reports.

How the agent differs from the app

Zest’s key feature is that the app connects to the user’s bank cards via the financial service Plaid and tracks where a person actually eats in order to understand their tastes. When building personalized maps and lists, only food and drink transactions are taken into account. The company’s founder and CEO Mario Gomez-Hall explains the advantage of this approach: “The agent is now the product. You text it, and it responds based on your history and your friends’ history. It doesn’t need weeks of conversation to learn about you, because it starts from where you’ve actually been.” According to him, this allows Zest to learn tastes faster than general-purpose AI assistants.

Group chats and monetization plans

The concierge can be added to a group chat: it will combine the tastes of all participants, help decide on a choice through a poll right in the conversation, and book a table for the whole group without leaving the dialogue. In TechCrunch’s tests, the agent picked places fairly well based on time of day, group size and location. The company began testing the concierge last month but delayed the launch to add the booking feature. Booking and food ordering are named as the first revenue sources: Zest already books tables through OpenTable and Resy, with food ordering on the roadmap. The startup, co-founded in November 2024, with $1.8 million in pre-seed funding from Alexis Ohanian (776) and Steve Jang (Kindred Ventures), hopes that moving into SMS will let it scale beyond its first few thousand users. In the longer term, the company is considering going beyond restaurants — recommendations for shops, shopping and other areas.