When looking for a new place to dine locally, many of us rely on friends for recommendations – but the Secondz app is changing all that.

Co-founders Taf Chiwanza and Sean Donnelly describe it as “the Spotify for food”, but where Spotify recommends playlists based on your music taste, Secondz dishes up smart, relevant restaurant recommendations tailored to you.

Whether you’re exploring a new city or simply discovering a different part of town, with Secondz, you can help yourself to restaurant listings curated to your taste, style and craving.

The entrepreneurs behind Secondz

Taf and Sean met while working on the restaurant review platform Zomato. It was around that time they started to notice some of the flaws in traditional reviewing and rating systems.

“For years, we’ve relied on anonymous reviews, five-star ratings, and ranking algorithms that can be gamed. None of it reflects how we actually decide where to go,” says Sean. “People don’t scroll through hundreds of reviews before picking a restaurant, they ask a friend.”

Rather than adding to the sea of faceless, impersonal ratings we’ve become accustomed to, Secondz is powered by personal recommendations.

“Instead of filtering through unreliable reviews from strangers, you get real recommendations from the people you trust like friends, food lovers and industry experts,” says Sean.

As an enthusiastic early adopter of new technology, Taf – who is also the proud owner of a Mercedes-Benz GLE 300d 4MATIC+ SUV – says he and Sean noticed people were increasingly seeking food recommendations through social media, entrusting friends and close networks to help them find their next meal out.

“We thought, ‘There has to be a better way to find restaurants.’ No one had built a platform to manage this. We wanted to build the Spotify of restaurant recommendations,” explains Taf.

“There was no app anywhere where you could get off a plane and, in less than 60 seconds, find out where all the best chefs in that city recommended you go, where all your own network has eaten and recommended, and access curated lists from tastemakers in that city.”

How Secondz is shifting perceptions

While star-rating systems are common, they often miss hidden gems or favour well-known, tourist-heavy spots. The biggest challenge for Taf and Sean is changing diners’ habits when searching for food experiences.

“Like anything new, when you're so used to doing something a certain way, it's hard to move away from that habit,” says Taf.

“You can look at examples like early Uber and Airbnb. No one would have imagined a stranger would pick them up on the side of the street after confirming their location on an app, and no one would have thought you could travel to Paris and stay in the spare room of someone you've never met or talked to before.”

Sean says diners are using a 3.9-star rating from strangers to decide where to eat out. “Food is personal. A single recommendation from the right person is worth more than a hundred anonymous reviews. That’s exactly why we built Secondz, to cut through the noise and bring food discovery back to what actually matters, which is real recommendations, from real people, in real time.”

Secondz focuses on relevance and quality, unlike many other food-finding platforms, which tend to focus on rankings and quantity.

“Instead of a wall of generic reviews, Secondz delivers quick, easy-to-access recommendations from people whose opinions actually matter to you,” says Sean.

Evolving with their users

Available to use in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Gold Coast, Secondz is quickly becoming a source of truth for Australian foodies, and there are plans to take it global.

“We want to be the first thing a person thinks about when they are trying to find a restaurant,” says Taf. “We’re launching in Bali in March 2025, followed by other countries in South East Asia.”

“We’re also building a personalisation engine that learns your tastes,” says Sean. “The more you engage, the smarter it gets, curating recommendations that feel like they were made just for you.”

The founders are also committed to working alongside the app’s users to improve functionality.

“We started getting a flood of requests for a ‘maps’ feature because users wanted to visually explore what’s nearby to make a quick decision,” says Sean.

They listened, moved fast, and launched the first version of ‘Maps for Foodboards’ earlier this year – a function that allows users to view the location of all the recommended spots when they create or explore a food board.

“It’s a perfect example of how we’re building this with our users, not just for them,” says Sean. “We’re constantly evolving based on what they actually need.”

Secondz is available for download via Apple and Google Play.