One of the biggest challenges in food discovery is being relevant to the local tastes of people. We took a step towards that with our last major product update by introducing Collections that catered to a variety of local tastes, ranging from Afternoon Tea in London to Artisanal Coffee in Manila, as well as popular themes that work across locations, such as Romantic and Outdoor restaurants.

It’s fair to say that some people in a city know the best it has to offer – whether it’s a tiny coffee shop tucked away in a back-alley, a Chinese restaurant that delivers 24×7, or even a newly opened restaurant that does the best spaghetti carbonara in town. So now, to share even more of that local knowledge, we’re introducing Neighborhood Experts.

Becoming an Expert needs you to know your city and its various neighborhoods inside-out – and we’re not just talking the popular restaurants and the hotspots that everyone already knows about. We mean really knowing the best places to find anything a fellow foodie might be looking to dig into.

To be able to boast a snazzy Expert badge on your profile, you need to:

• write 10 great reviews of restaurants in a single neighborhood.
• post 50 photos of restaurants in that same neighborhood (they’ll all need to be tagged to restaurants in that neighborhood to count)

In case you’re wondering how a neighborhood is defined, it’s written just adjacent to the name of the restaurant on a restaurant page (it’s also the area mentioned at the start of the address on the restaurant page): 

As you conquer neighborhoods, you’ll get badges on your profile that announce you as an Expert in those areas: 

The best part? There’s no limit on how many neighborhoods you can be an Expert in, and your expertise is valid forever once you’ve earned it.

With the introduction of Experts, you’re going to notice one little difference – we won’t have city-level leaderboards anymore. Given the way the Expert system is structured, you get to share your valuable foodie knowledge across an even wider area (literally), while still engaging in a little healthy competition with your friends to see who conquers a shared neighborhood first. We’re working to make being an Expert even more valuable, because we envision a world where every neighborhood has an Expert who isn’t just passionate about food, but also has the best food stories to tell.

So here’s to you, Experts!