Ben's List
A curated restaurant recommendation chatbot — benslist.food ↗
I keep a list of my favorite restaurants from around the world. I've been collecting them for over a decade using this methodology , and it's grown to over 260 restaurants.
Friends, friends of friends, and coworkers always ask me "Where should I eat in LA?" "What's good in SF?". I was handing out my google maps based list, but the experience was clunky. There was no filtering, and generally no easy way to find what I was looking for. So I built an AI chatbot that knows my entire restaurant list.
The Build
Nov 2024
The chaotic first day
Basic chat tool with a fancy UI. Spent too long on visual polish. Nuked everything, went minimal chat-only. Shipped something that actually worked.
Oct 2025
The comeback sprint
9-month pause. Came back with streaming responses, Stripe donations, tried Google Maps integration. Over-engineered it, ripped the maps out.
Mar 2026
Two-stage pipeline
Switched OpenAI → Claude. Built a Haiku-extracts-filters → code-filters-260-restaurants → Sonnet-recommends pipeline. 6-9x token reduction. Finally fast and cheap enough to scale.