biteclub

About the Project

We built BiteClub around a simple question: who do you actually trust when deciding where to eat?

Restaurant ratings are everywhere, but a 4.8-star rating from hundreds of anonymous reviews doesn't always tell you what you need to know. We realized that we often trust a friend's recommendation much more than a crowd of strangers. That became the inspiration for BiteClub — a social dining journal where people discover restaurants through the experiences of people whose taste they trust.

BiteClub combines the familiarity of a social feed with the personal history of a dining diary. Users can explore restaurants, see experiences from people in their circle, save places, and log what they actually ordered, how the food and service felt, whether they would return, and their honest thoughts.

We also wanted the experience to extend beyond the app. Each dining experience can be transformed into a visually designed 9:16 story card, making it easy to share a recommendation with friends through social media.

What We Learned

One of our biggest learnings was that building a good product isn't just about adding features. We had to constantly ask ourselves what actually supported our core idea of trusted recommendations.

We learned how to move from a static interface to a persistent application using Firebase Authentication, Firestore, and Firebase Storage. We also explored how product design, data, and social sharing can work together to create a more engaging experience.

How We Built It

We designed BiteClub with a visual language inspired by editorial food photography, Letterboxd-style personal logging, and social storytelling.

The application uses Firebase for authentication and persistent user data. Dining experiences, saved restaurants, profiles, and uploaded food photos are stored so that a user's dining history follows them across sessions.

The frontend was designed mobile-first with a focus on immersive photography, editorial typography, simple interactions, and a comfortable browsing experience.

Challenges

Our biggest challenge was deciding what to build within a limited hackathon timeframe without losing the product's identity.

We had to balance a social experience, restaurant discovery, personal dining history, authentication, photo uploads, and story sharing while keeping the experience simple.

Another challenge was designing around the limitations of anonymous restaurant ratings. Instead of trying to create another review platform with more ratings, we focused on a different question: