When I sat down with Steve Raggiani at Golden Diner in Manhattan Chinatown to talk about his restaurant app, 8it, he promptly informed me that he’d never been interviewed before. That said, he wasn’t exactly shy about his zeal for the project—he was literally wearing an 8it-branded sweatshirt.
8it is an app designed to help you find what you want to eat fast. No need to cross-reference all the different gustatory information sources, from newspapers to Yelp to influencers and beyond; 8it promises to do that work for you so you can quickly find pho or barbecue you know will be good without all the hassle.
Raggiani grew up in Boston, but his father owned Italian restaurants in New Hampshire and Maine. “I grew up in a restaurant my whole life… I was a host, busboy, waiter, pastry chef, dishwasher, line cook, and then when I got to be 17, I decided I wanted to work behind the bar, and my dad was like, ‘Okay.’ He had me train under his head bartender and learn how to make all the drinks and that was where I started to scratch my itch for not only hospitality but marketing.”
An “Italian sports bar” was connected to the Maine restaurant. Steve was given “autonomy to come up with marketing ideas to get people to come into the bar, and then I started teaching myself Microsoft Publisher. I was making sick flyers and putting them all around.” Those flyers were the seed that led to a thriving career in advertising—Raggiani has worked for ad agencies, in-house at Campari and Espolon Tequila, and now is Head of Creative at LiveNation, where he’s worked for 8 years.
“Got to New York, single guy, disposable income, love food. And I’m just like, how do I find the best food in the simplest way? I had, like, 20 tabs open on my computer. Eater, The Infatuation, New York Times, Thrillist, YouTube, Yelp, and then I had my phone out separately and I’m saving things and cross-referencing my tabs on my phone. I was like, this is ridiculous. Why is it taking so long to find the best ramen in Williamsburg? That was where the lightbulb clicked.”
It drove him crazy that eating well required so much “homework,” so he decided to use his advertising brain to fix it. He wanted to make something that could be the “TLDR” of restaurant reviews. “If I just want to go from being hungry to eating something certified delicious, and I only want to touch the screen three times, how do I get there? All the other apps were going restaurant-first instead of dish-first, and I don’t think you crave a restaurant.”
That dish-first vision led 8it (which, despite the app’s polished appearance, is run by Raggiani and his wife with very little outside help) to be structured like a list of fabulous foodstuffs. Are you feeling like dim sum? Just scroll down and click one button, and you’ll have a list of all the best pork buns and sui mai around. Want to know what pop-ups are currently operating in town? 8it might be the best place to find a comprehensive list. Starving and want to know what’s in your area? Press the “I’m Hangry” button to see all the best spots near you. However, convenience is only one element of Raggiani’s plan for the app.
What Raggiani’s identified here is exciting. Not only does prioritizing individual dishes instead of restaurants themselves open people up to the possibility of trying something new, but it also eliminates the need for potentially culturally hairy adjectives like “authentic.” Plus, he feels that organizing by cuisine can be confusing. “Looking at how other apps organize data on food, I see the word ‘American’ used a lot. I’ve never craved American food, like that doesn’t make sense... there’s not a Japanese section on the app. There’s sushi. There’s barbecue. Spring rolls. We’re focused on getting hyperspecific… There’s a tartare category in the app. There’s an uni category. I crave those things.”
There are tiny, eight-character descriptions of each dish on 8it, but the app does not attempt to editorialize. The descriptions are like “haikus for food.” As such, 8it’s almost a pure aggregator of information from the same trustworthy sources Steve was so tired of cross-referencing. 8it also sources reviews from people in the restaurant industry, curating collections of favorite bites from food personalities like Bagel Ambassador Sam Silverman and posthumous favorites from Anthony Bourdain. Raggiani hopes that this philosophy, combined with his personable social media and Family Meal, a party series 8it hosts for hospitality people, makes his app a net good for the industry.
“It’s always been my vision to build it industry-first. I just see a lot of apps come out that are these soulless, faceless brands. The head of the kitchen, the owner, they don’t know who’s behind these apps. They just see them pop up and all of a sudden, they’re asking them for money. I go back to my days of working in the restaurant and having salespeople come in asking us to do like ads on the radio or whatever. We never had budget for that shit. There’s no margins in the restaurant industry… Everyone’s first question when I started 8it was, ‘How are you gonna make money?’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t know, we’ll figure it out. But it’s not going to be from having restaurants pay.”’
For him, someone whose family “was talking about dinner while we were eating lunch” and who used to spend summers harvesting clams from the ocean with his grandfather to make linguini vongole, supporting the restaurant industry was the obvious way to approach this. “Food has always been a core part of my life. I don’t even know what life is without food. It’s more than just sustenance.”
At this point, dear reader, I feel it is vital for you to know that Steve and I started waxing poetic about the “cartoon pancakes” we were eating, fully departing from the interview to comment on how they seemed to have come out of Rocko’s Modern Life or a Studio Ghibli movie.
Once we got back on topic, I asked him to give me more context for his grievances with user-generated review content, restaurant influencers, and sites like “the demonic Yelp.” Raggiani pointed out that there are too many voices to sift through these days. While user-generated content certainly has a place and even sometimes an important function online: “We’re just inundated with so much content. I like using the term content pollution… my vision for 8it is to be all about curated opinions. Food will always be subjective. You’ll never take the subjectivity out of food. But what we can do is draw the circle a little bit smaller and make sure that the credible people are in the circle… If you want to be efficient and just see what chefs and people in food media and people that know what the fuck they’re talking about think the best pancakes are, that’s kinda all I care about.”
For now, 8it’s functionality is somewhat limited and highly NYC-specific. The app needs to be further fleshed out with more kinds of dishes in more places. But given that it’s such a shoestring operation, it’s pretty remarkable how useful the app already is and how dedicated Raggiani is to continuing to improve it. 8it gave out awards to outstanding pop-ups this year, and chef Jay Rodriguez of Hera NYC, the winner of Best Pop-up 2023, is catering the next Family Meal. There’s a blog on the website for 8it-approved reviews. To say this app is ambitious means underselling it a bit.
Raggiani’s right that cutting through the noise of so much content pollution makes knowing who to trust almost impossible. But I can assure you that if you’re looking for something delicious right this very second, you can trust 8it to find a worthy opinion for you.