Paris chefs catering for diners in their own homes
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
With Uber, I can check the car has seat belts before we depart, see if there are any big dents in the chassis, etc. If the driver is driving erraticly, I can ask them to stop the car and I can leave.
With a sharing-economy-restaurant, there's no way for me to assess how safe the food is to eat. Is this person's fridge at a safe temperature? Do they use a separate cutting board for raw meat or fish? Do they regularly wash their hands? Did they try making their own chilli oil and accidentally culture botulism? Did they use some mouldy peanuts full of aflatoxin?
It's much harder to pick up on these things. The first you might know about them is two or three days later when you get sick.
These are risks with any restaurant, but with a regular restaurant they are inspected, licensed etc. I eat food prepared by my friends, but I trust my friends implicitly, and my friends aren't financially motivated so aren't incentivised to cut corners.
Call me a food safety nit, but the idea of eating food prepared by unlicensed strangers does not seem appealing.
But you just said you do it all the time when your friends cook. Is the only difference the profit motivation? As the article says, this is often more of a hobby than a "real" business... personally, I'd sooner suspect a restaurant – with their notoriously thin margins – to cut corners. I think with a decent reputation system (word of mouth, or some established online source) I'd be comfortable taking a chance at one of these establishments.
a friend is not a stranger. You know and trust your friends. (Presumably.)
That's true... somehow I completely overlooked that word in the original post. Still: there are certainly some friends of mine where I'd rather eat the food of a stranger any day of the week.
Furthermore, cooking is a real profession in France, with a solid training system in place.
I can count the amount of bad meals I've had in France on one hand (actually, only 1 was truly bad).
Salmonella - 1/20000 eggs. Beef/pork - sterile inside, parasites are virtually eliminated from the commercial pork, so only charring on the surface is needed. Salmon - anisakis cannot pass the intestine barrier anyway.
Any food that has been brought to boil/pressure cooker - safe.
I'm germophobic nut. At public bathrooms, I'll take one last paper towel to wrap around the door handle and open it as I leave because in my mind, the door and faucets have more germs than the toilet seat.
That said, I have no fear of eating meals cooked by strangers. That sort of thing happens all the time. The last-minute party crashing at unknown host during college. Or coworkers (many strangers, not all friends) bring potluck to the office party. I've worked the kitchens at restaurants and I don't hold the government licensing and regular inspections as something that puts my mind at ease.
I'm not discounting your opinion or apprehensiveness about the underground restaurant model. However, I'm fascinated that we assign different degrees of risk to it.
Such a fantastic book about cooking.
And a once-yearly inspection that is announced with plenty of notice to the restaurants to clean up their act makes you feel safer? I've been to restaurants with a 100% health score and yet there's rat feces on the floor and dirty silverware. I for one would feel much better about eating in someone's home, especially if the home is immaculate. Obviously if you walk into a home chef's house and it's filthy, you'd be stupid to eat there, and it's the same with a restaurant.
> Is this person's fridge at a safe temperature? Do they use a separate cutting board for raw meat or fish? Do they regularly wash their hands? Did they try making their own chilli oil and accidentally culture botulism? Did they use some mouldy peanuts full of aflatoxin?
Call me crazy, but I feel safer eating at a chef's house than out of a perfectly legal streetside food truck. I'm an amateur cook on the level of many contestants on the show "Master Chef", and I follow strict personal guidelines for clean and safe cooking even though it's just for me and my family. If anything, I am more strict on myself when cooking for strangers, not less. An actual chef (read: trained and licensed, unlike me) should have even higher standards, so I don't see the issue from a health and safety point of view.
No, just like the taxi lobbies and Lyft/Uber/Sidecar, this is a consumer-friendly disruption of the old guard, and they are choosing to litigate instead of competing on their merits.
Then... license them.
It's just a regulatory glitch that they currently aren't licensed; not a sign of something fundamentally wrong with the underlying business model.
It's considered 'underground' because it's strait up illegal given the various other laws concerning business and food preparation. You can't just scrap every law to accommodate something that's become trendy unless you're prepared for neighbourhoods and apartment buildings to all become commercial zones and allow other forms of home businesses...
It feels like this with all this 'sharing economy' stuff. Restaurants probably started off (many, many) years ago just being people inviting others over to eat - over time the best hosts started to charge more and more, and bought bigger and bigger places to host more and more people. Soon there were enough people doing this that it needed to be regulated.
It's like we're going in a circle.
Here's a page with a lot of history on several different food topics: http://www.foodtimeline.org/restaurants.html
One interesting tidbit is that oldest dining menu comes from ancient Sumeria. They list a proper meal for the gods. Since the king was considered a living god, this could be considered a menu for the king. (So restaurants likely started off as a formalized meal "ritual" for the king.)
It also says that, broadly, street food can be traced back to military mess units. It's likely that during peacetime, the people who prepared food for military units went on to prepare food for the general public.
I also like to imagine that we have football stadiums now because of the Roman use of the Coliseum for watching live sports thousands of years ago, and the Coliseum was just the largest amphitheater, a structure which the Romans borrowed from the ancient Greeks. This would significantly predate the development of football.
My point was we seem to be starting this iteration from scratch for a quite a few things.
Just to pick an example:
- Single developer is smart, hard working, and produces an excellent concept (minecraft alpha) - Interest grows, sales increase and a team is formed (minecraft beta). Things improve even more. - Product grows too big and sales start following the right hand side of the bell curve (microsoft involvement, minecraft story holo lense...). Seriously I think we are past peak minecraft.
In fashion and culture, we call it a fad. In investing, we call it a bubble. In business people make comments about corportism and monopolies. However, time and time again, we see this cycle.
What a disaster. /s
I do a lot of cooking myself (expat french, it's survival requirement ;-)) so I'm actually quite interested by that setup, especially to meet people who also cook or just appreciate good food...
> Restaurants, until recently, were places of refuge for people
> excluded from the mainstream or seeking to escape it—poor students,
> aging unmarried men not rich enough to have themselves fed at home,
> richer men seeking sex not wives, and the proverbial artists leading
> their irresponsible lives. Over the last half-century, restaurants
> have risen in importance to fill the void left by the decline of the
> old public celebrations. They now provide the leading forums of public
> participation.
Whether this approach is inherently better or worse _in totality_ is a somewhat irrelevant question.
And I don't mean "reheated frozen prepared food", a lot of people actually do cook when other people are eating it. At least, around here they do.
Getting to make a great meal would be fun. And getting paid a little bit would make the hobby even better.
How do I get started? Which one of ya'll is starting this app?
The basic idea written about here isn't unreasonable. However, I'd posit that most of the people who want to eat well but don't want to spend the time cooking would also have trouble with the planning for someone to come over to their house at a specific time.
Absolutely. In the past times of high inequality it was routine for the comparatively small number of "middle class" people to have at least one member of domestic staff, often a woman who would cook and clean. This absolutely relies on high income inequality and low tax overhead of having an employee, who themselves would not have a pension or social security.
This is admittedly a bit different as it's more like bringing the restaurant experience to the home and doesn't seem to really be intended as a day-to-day thing but rather an alternative to going to a restaurant for a nice meal out. It's really not that far removed from a caterer although caterers tend to focus on larger parties. (Though, when I worked part-time for a caterer back in school, we did handle more modestly-sized groups like Thanksgiving dinners in a house.)
But really, this turns on a grey line. If someone is doing a weekly or semi-monthly meal in their own home, for a handful of people, is that a "restaurant"? If I invite a friend for dinner and they bring a date, am I now a "restaurant"? On the other hand, if someone is doing this three nights a week and turning a real profit, that's kinda different. A regulatory line should be set.
The cleanliness issues, I think, are totally overrated. No one is going to be serving something they haven't tried making before. If they poisoned themselves, they'll learn. Cleanliness is harder cooking at scale.
Am I the only one who found this sentence awkward?
"According to Jaime, the Mexican, there are growing numbers of "secret restaurants" in Paris"
The horror.
Creative destruction is a bitch when you're the one getting destroyed.
Pretty sure restaurants will survive this, though their service may have to improve.