Like many college students, Anushka Agarwala’s most-used app is Instagram. Her second-most used, though, is Beli. Since becoming one of the restaurant-tracking app’s earliest beta users prior to its 2021 launch, the Northwestern University senior has logged over 1,200 spots from all over the world, making her one of the most avid Beli users on campus.
Beli is to foodies as Goodreads is to bookworms or as Letterboxd is to cinephiles. The app allows users to not only find new restaurants but rank their favorites and see which ones their friends love most.
And Agarwala’s not slowing down anytime soon. Her 75-week and counting Beli streak pushes her to log a new restaurant every week. At Northwestern, she sometimes keeps it up through ordering takeout from different places. But she prefers to do it through travelling. So far, she’s been to 27 countries.
“I plan my vacations around where I want to go to eat,” Agarwala says. When she visited Australia for three weeks, for instance, she says she ate at over 70 different locations — all of which she logged on Beli, of course. But she doesn’t limit herself to dining establishments. From crocodile meat Down Under to fried cockroaches in Vietnam, she seeks out local delicacies.
“I was in Morocco over the winter with my family, and I was like, we should go visit this random-ass historical site,” Agarwala says. “They’re like, ‘Why?’ And I was like, ‘Because apparently the best camel meat kebabs are right next to it.’”
Keeping track of the restaurants she visited began before she started using Beli, though. Since 2017, she’s maintained a spreadsheet of everywhere she’s eaten. She retroactively entered many of those spots into Beli.
That year was also when she started her blog, “Anushka Eats the World,” and started posting photos of her meals on a food-specific Instagram account. But she didn’t take content creation seriously until 2021, when she moved from boarding school in New Jersey back to Singapore during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, she uploads food content wherever she goes. Along with her Beli activity, she’s gained over 3,000 Instagram followers and has collaborated with restaurants.
Her adventurous palette came from spending time in different environments. She grew up in India, lived in New Jersey for high school, and now attends college in Evanston, Illinois, just an hour away from Chicago.
In particular, she says “being a picky eater was not really an option” living in India. Festivals and family gatherings all revolved around food, and both her parents were “big foodies.”
“I grew up really enjoying and experimenting with food, and also not using just food as a source of nourishment and survival but community and connection and relationships,” Agarwala says.
So, trying unfamiliar foods rarely poses a challenge. Even the Scottish delicacy of haggis didn’t deter her. But there is one food she says she dislikes, and another she won’t touch at all.
“I was force fed cauliflower as a kid,” she says. “Maybe that’s why I don’t like it, but I could probably eat cauliflower if I had to. I will not eat cooked tuna. I love sashimi, like I will eat toro all day, but the second tuna is cooked, it ain’t coming near my mouth.”
When she attended boarding school in the United States, she lived alone for the first time, sometimes going on solo weekend trips to New York. Naturally, she would get hungry during the day. She got comfortable eating at restaurants alone, but she says it was “definitely a learning curve.”
Once she arrived at Northwestern, she noticed servers were more conversational than those in Singapore. They would often talk to people eating by themselves. Instead of saying dishes were simply “good,” or “fine,” Agarwala says she asked questions about the stories behind dishes.
“There’s this language I’ve built around food that helps me make connections with people,” she says.
These conversations developed into lasting relationships. She’s a familiar face at Alinea, a three-star Michelin restaurant in Chicago featured on Chef’s Table.
When she wants to try a restaurant for the first time, she says she brings up promotional opportunities through her blog and social media. Even when a space is supposedly full, she asks if there’s a seat for one more person.
“It’s just remembering small details about the specific person I’m talking to, but also not being shy about reaching out,” Agarwala says. “Taking that initiative, I think, helps them recognize you, and then eventually that relationship builds.”
During a Los Angeles fire relief event at Achatz’s Aviary, she met Chef’s Table executive producer and director Brian McGinn. And last October, she attended a dinner for the family-owned French champagne house Drappier. She told her seatmate, the daughter of the family, about her goal to work in wine marketing.
Her content creation efforts have paid off. She says she was singing karaoke at a Chicago bar when a woman asked her if she was Anushka Eats the World. “It was just such a strange experience to have someone I did not know at all come up to me, in the wild, and be like, ‘Oh my god, I know your food blog,’” Agarwala says.
Still, running a blog and social media account doesn’t always go smoothly. As a frequent traveller, she says marketing content to users from a specific location was difficult, as was keeping up with digital algorithms.
After graduating from Northwestern this summer, she plans to study wine marketing in Paris. Despite having traveled around the world, graduate school will be her first time in France.
She briefly dropped out of Beli’s top 200 users because she ran out of restaurants to try in Evanston, but reclaiming that spot is high on her priorities.
“I don’t know about my French visa, what’s going to happen with that,” Agarwala says. “But I do know the first 500 restaurants I want to go to in France.”
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