Zest's AI Concierge Books Restaurant Reservations by Text

Zest, the restaurant discovery app that launched earlier this year, introduced a new AI agent on Thursday that recommends restaurants and books reservations entirely through text messages, TechCrunch reports. Users text the concierge at (212) 470-6067 to get suggestions and, if they choose, have the agent complete the booking without leaving the conversation.

How does the text-based concierge work?

The agent answers questions about cuisine, craving, occasion, dietary restrictions, or neighborhood, and can tell users how busy a restaurant might be, whether it has Wi-Fi, or send over a menu, according to TechCrunch. Once a diner picks a place, the AI checks availability and books a table through connected reservation platforms including OpenTable, Resy, and SevenRooms — all inside the same text thread.

How does Zest know what a user likes?

Zest links to a user's credit cards through the financial services company Plaid, the same infrastructure used by banks and budgeting apps, to track where someone has actually eaten, TechCrunch reports. The company says it limits its data pull to food and drink transaction categories, then uses that history to build personalized recommendations for a user's home city or for travel. Founder and CEO Mario Gomez-Hall told TechCrunch the approach lets the agent skip the onboarding period other AI tools require: "You text it, and it answers from your own history and your friends'. It doesn't need weeks of conversation to learn you because it starts from where you've actually been."

How does the group chat voting feature work?

The concierge can be added directly to a group chat, where it blends the food histories of everyone in the thread to surface options the whole group might agree on, per TechCrunch. From there, it can run an in-thread vote to settle on a restaurant and then book the table for the group — a specific answer to the common problem of friends stalling over where to eat. TechCrunch's own testing of the agent found it "worked fast."

Who is behind Zest, and who funds it?

Zest was founded in November 2024 with $1.8 million in pre-seed funding from Alexis Ohanian of 776 and Steve Jang of Kindred Ventures, according to TechCrunch. The company frames the text-message launch as part of a wider industry shift away from standalone mobile apps and toward conversational AI agents that live inside messaging threads — a category TechCrunch compares to agents like Instinct or Poke. Gomez-Hall put the shift directly: "The agent is the product now."

What to watch

• Whether Zest expands beyond OpenTable, Resy, and SevenRooms to cover more reservation platforms and independent restaurants.
• How the group-voting feature performs with larger or less food-aligned friend groups, where credit card histories may pull in different directions.
• Whether linking financial transaction data to a texting agent draws scrutiny from privacy-focused users or regulators, given the use of Plaid's banking-linked infrastructure.
• Whether rival AI agents built for messaging apps add similar restaurant-booking features, intensifying competition in the same conversational-interface space Zest is betting on.