Looking at the dining room table as the original social network.
‘WE LOOK AT THE DINING ROOM TABLE AS THE ORIGINAL SOCIAL NETWORK’
For many travellers, the best way to measure the pulse of a different city or country is to eat its food. So when Noah Karesh and his girlfriend were on vacation in Guatemala but couldn’t find anywhere to eat that wasn’t catering to tourists, they felt a little lost.
“( We approached) an avocado seller, thinking, ‘ Let’s give it one more chance,’ ” Karesh recalls. “We asked him, ‘ Do you know where we can find good Guatemalan food?’ With a huge smile on his face, he’s like, yeah, my mom’s house.”
Karesh and his girlfriend joined the vendor at his mother’s house later that day for a meal. “I was like, wow, this is magic,” Karesh recalls. It was then that the wheels were set in motion for Feastly, the “Airbnb for dinner” that Karesh launched in 2013.
On paper, the idea is simple: Feastly is a community of home cooks and chefs offering culinary experiences — for a fee — outside of the traditional dining experience, often inside their homes. Users can browse upcoming meals scheduled in their city, or request a dinner from one of the thousands of registered cooks on the site. “The idea is that there’s an opportunity there to enable an interaction,” Karesh says. “We look at the dining room table as the original social network.”
He’s not alone. VizEat, a similar startup based in Europe, partnered with Airbnb earlier this year (its founder, Jean- Michel Petit — like Karesh — was inspired to launch the company after a meal eaten abroad) and now features hosts in more than 65 countries. EatWith and PlateCulture, based in Lithuania and San Francisco, respectively, also fit the mould. Chefs and cooks charge per head, and each platform takes a cut of the proceeds. It’s a part of the sharing economy that is increasingly tailored to travellers and tourists in that it offers an opportunity to learn more about the flavour of a given location through a conversation over dinner.
And for the cooks and chefs on these networks, the opportunity is more varied still. Charlotte Langley, one of the few Canadian chefs using the platforms — she’s a user on VizEat — says that if offers a great platform to market herself, without having to worry about coordinating the back-end.
“Co- branding is a really big part of how we work these days,” says Langley, who often hosts dinners in her home and caters outside of it with her company, Scout Canning. “Being an event coordinator isn’t really fruitful for me. By working with these guys, they can take the brand and the product and push it for me, and then I execute the product. Specialty for specialty.”
Meanwhile, Karesh notes that many of the chefs and food service industry workers who use Feastly are doing so not just to make extra cash, but to exercise a little creative freedom. “All these folks are artisans,” he explains.
“They’re creatives. And nobody treats them l i ke that. We’re saying, no, these people are artists who are not typically getting credit for it, or not making substantial wages, which is a huge issue.”
Some chefs — such as Langley — use these platforms for an increased profile as well as extra cash flow, while others set up pop- up dinners and events to fund bricks- and- mortar restaurants; kind of like Kickstarter, but with immersive advertising built right in.
What Karesh calls a “symbiotic relationship with the restaurant industry” also helps platforms like Feastly and VizEat circumvent the criticism that has been lobbed towards other elements of the sharing economy, such as Uber or Airbnb. “We have a lot of people who are in the restaurant world that use us,” he says. “Think of when restaurants are written about: when they open, change chefs, and when they close — when they fail. And 90 per cent of restaurants are failing. So why do we keep doing this, when it doesn’t work?”
To that end, Karesh and Feastly have set up a permanent pop- up space in San Francisco, which can be used by Feastly users there looking for a more professional, out- of- home hosting experience. He’s also looking at expansion. As it stands, neither Feastly nor any of the other platforms mentioned have a substantial Canadian presence — which, Langley says of her experience with VizEat, means “nobody knows it exists” — but Karesh foresees that changing.
“Toronto’s an amazing food city and an amazing city that we’re definitely interested in,” he says. “We’ve had some meals in Canada, but we haven’t officially launched there. I can’t offer any details yet, but our goal is to be in every city in the world.”