Food recommendations
should taste like you.

Food and data.
A very personal project.

I’m Mazin.

Food has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Some of my earliest memories are watching cooking shows with my mom and paying way more attention than a kid probably should.

Eventually, watching wasn’t enough.

I wanted to cook.

So I started experimenting at home. Then cooking for my family, my friends, and eventually becoming the person everyone expected to have an opinion on where we should eat.

Food became more than something I liked.

It became how I spend time with people.

I cook when friends come over. I’ll spend an entire day working on one dish just because I want to get it right. At one point, I even ran a small pop-up serving smoked brisket and chili cheese fries.

It sold out.

And funny enough, even my work in data ended up being in the food business.

So while I was professionally studying how people order, choose and behave around food, I was also the guy driving across Jeddah because TikTok convinced me a new restaurant was worth trying.

Sometimes it was.

Sometimes I’d leave wondering how everyone loved it except me.

At first, I thought I just needed better reviewers.

Then I realised even the most honest reviewer is still recommending food based on their taste, not mine.

But there were always certain people whose recommendations just worked for me.

We liked the same places, disliked the same things, and somehow ate the same way.

And being a data person, I thought:

Surely we can measure that.

What if discovering food wasn’t about the highest rating, the newest opening or the loudest recommendation?

What if it was simply:

“People who eat like you loved this.”

That idea became Thawq.

A project that brings together two things I’ve spent way too much of my life thinking about:

food and data.

Mazin Habis, Jeddah