Launch HN: Taste (YC W21) – Recreate nice restaurant experiences at home | Hacker News Reader

Launch HN: Taste (YC W21) – Recreate nice restaurant experiences at home

gettaste.com

75 pointsdealmak3r61 comments

Hi HN!

Jeff and Daryl here. We’re founders of Taste (https://gettaste.com), a marketplace where you can order multi-course dinners from nicer restaurants.

Daryl and I became friends because we both loved to hack on projects. In fact, when COVID hit Daryl had just flown back to San Francisco after spending a week in my apartment hacking (we were building a neural net to be our fashion advisor...ahem anyways). We immediately saw how devastating the pandemic was for restaurants that didn't have a delivery business and we wanted to help them.

Thankfully Daryl and I were also bad cooks and we were both tired of our own cooking, so we thought maybe we can ask restaurants to bring those nice dining experiences to people's homes. Our idea of ‘nice’ was to start with a cool bag with the restaurant’s logo, pull out a restaurant menu card, and then eat a multi-course meal complete with wine pairings - this is like what you'd have for a ‘nice’ night out. And thus, Taste was born.

At first, we just hung out in my living room and texted customers and restaurants from our personal cell phones on delivery nights (aka the ‘ops team’). We didn't have a way to track drivers, so we asked drivers to add us on WhatsApp to share their location. We were frequently up late because we hadn't yet automated simple stuff like asking diners for feedback and computing payouts to restaurants. But we loved it all because we felt like we were making a real difference.

The coolest thing was the diner feedback was amazing - people LOVED the tasting menu experience at home and consistently texted us photos of their meals and their 'date night at home', and many wrote that it was the best meal they've had in their life. Restaurant or no restaurant.

Fast forward to today, we're helping 15 restaurants in NYC deliver experiences weekly and have delivered thousands of dinner kits. We were really happy recently when one of our partners told us that they were able to pay their staff and squeeze out a tiny profit because of our help. We’re also astaying afloat by taking a small cut of every transaction.

There's a dream too! We have big plans for Taste's future as these popular restaurants were so difficult to access before the pandemic. Especially for busy professionals and people with kids, it was a struggle to book reservations weeks in advance, get home early, dress up, go out, and finally stumble home. We want to democratize access to these restaurants by bringing them to you and making the menus cheaper!

Finally, as nerds who are interested in hardcore technology this project surprised us with a number of interesting technical challenges. Routing cars to do multiple deliveries is basically an intense version of the Traveling Salesman Problem. Personalizing menu recommendations for diners where menus are changing every week requires using some of the latest NLP techniques. And building a reliable money transaction system with bells and whistles (refunds, cancelations, edits, disputes) is also quite tricky.

Taste is now in NYC and we're coming to SF soon. You can check out all the restaurants and menus directly at https://gettaste.com/eat?z=10014&s=direct we have a ton of features in mind and would love to hear your ideas, experiences, feedback and any feature requests!

This seems to be more in the vein of "add soup to ramen noodles" that I get from my local ramen spot rather than a fully blown meal-kit experience. Am I understanding that correctly?

I think "finishing notes" is what throws me off. I'm not sure what that actually means, which leads me to question how much effort I want to put into this vs Doordash.

I'm surprised there's no Valentine's Day promo, either.

Yup, we aim to get the finishing component to be less than 5 minutes. That's the best tradeoff we've found - minimal work and way better quality.

We're open to new ideas on the word too!

Finishing is what separates a nicely cooked meal from the version you would find in a Michelin star restaurant. The way it's sliced, the way it's placed on the plate, whatever else is on the plate, and how it's finally served to the diner is all of the final details that go into gourmet service. I tried signing up for this service but it's not in my area yet.

It looks like its just an upscale version of delivery. But instead of eating out of a takeout container, it's meant to go onto real plates with ingredients and instructions on how to serve it like they would at the restaurant. Many upscale places never did takeout simply because you cannot 100% recreate the experience when the food has been traveling in a bag for 30mins. I'm not sure what they are doing different but there is probably some reheating involved (like cook a steak halfway at the restaurant and then you sear it at home). Neat idea I guess for those that are too lazy to cook but want upscale dining at home. I don't see this lasting very long once things return to normal.

Something I'd rather see is a daily SMS service that sends out recipes for these kinds of menus. I don't mind spending a little extra money to have a gourmet experience at home but I'd rather be the one cooking everything fresh.

Purple Pig offers this nation-wide from their Chicago location:

https://purplepigshop.squarespace.com/shop/purple-piggy-box

I have ordered it before and it's incredible. At the time I had the thought of "I wish someone would curate these so that I could do more during lockdown".

Quick suggestion. I think one of the important parts of a high end meal is how it is served, including the actual plates on which food is served, and how the food is arranged. You pics on your landing page are indeed spot on on this, all meals are on the right kind of plate for the food being served and are very well arranged.

At home most people won't have what it takes to properly serve these meals, and will not know how to properly arrange things.

So there's two things that could be offered.

First some kind of instructions or even templates on how to arrange food on the plate. I'm thinking of actual "maps" to give a close to perfect layout for the food to be served, and how to achieve the desired positions.

Second, suggestions on what kind of plates to use and, possibly, links to buy them in advance, so when the food arrives the customer is ready. At first it could be affilate links to amazon (or alikes) and if it generates enough revenues you could then sell these things yourselves.

In any case best of luck!

Great ideas - yeah we send photos of the food plated at the restaurant as part of the experience. We might have to do the plates thing as you suggest as well...

I’m curious why would VC fund this. It will only be as scalable as restaurants are in terms of developing a special menu, instructions and packaging. What is the 100x business model here?

Well, we currently have the special menus because it's a high end product. But the demand for nice dinners should be way higher so we can launch our own 'model 3' as we scale.

Does that mean you would take food production in-house to be able to scale your “model 3”? My comment was from the perspective of partnering with existing restaurants as a service. If you do that, what will be your advantage and scalability over existing delivery kitchens?

We intend to stay a marketplace and partner with restaurants - right now the pool of restaurants is small because we are looking at high end 'tasting menu' type restaurants. But as we scale up, standard 1 app - 2 entrees - 1 dessert options will be added.

I said the same thing when Quibi started their ad blitz months and months before launching. Quibi had the problem that their business model was completely unproven (who TF actually has the stones to not just identify, but try to create a market between Netflix and YouTube?) This has a similar problem; they are launching just as the pandemic is starting to ratchet down, meaning their whole raison d'etre is in question.

But hey, sweet sweet VC money.

Yeah - our core thesis is that the demand has always been there, this is why people travel into cities on weekends for food. And if we can make it way easier to access then people would have nice dinners more. There was a study that 40% of Americans would like to eat out more than they do now.

What is the limiting factor though? Do they not eat out more because they don't have time to travel to the restaurant, or because they can't/don't want to pay for it? Seems to me like the bigger chunk of that 40% would fall into the second category, especially when talking about higher end experiences.

Well - at a high level the farther out we go and the busier the people (parents for example) the stronger the thesis is and the more convenient we seem.

I would think that even a modest success would fetch a high acquisition price from Uber or Doordash or Grubhub.

I've used Taste a handful of times over the past year in NYC. Sometimes the dishes do not translate well to the at home experience (mostly crunchy things getting soggy). Sometimes it wasn't clear what dish was what or how things should be enjoyed. It feels a bit wasteful when you get the big bag of disposable containers. Overall though, it's a nice service for these pandemic times but I definitely prefer the in restaurant experience.

Would love to talk to you about the different dishes - can you email us hi@gettaste.com We can change a lot of the dish experiences.

I love this! As someone who recently left NYC for NJ to quarantine and who regrets not taking advantage of these restaurant experiences while in the city - have you thought about "pickup tourism?" Assuming things can be chilled for long enough, someone within a reasonable distance could drive into NYC to a distribution center near one of the tunnels, you hand off a bag at a scheduled time, they drive home, and enjoy their meal! I don't know what the parking logistics would be, and I personally might be a bit far to viably benefit (sadly!), but you could rapidly expand your range with minimal driver coordination, for everyone in the larger metropolitan area who would be willing to drive a bit for a one-of-a-kind experience. No other model could do this, because you need really unique inventory and a reputation for the same, but it's incredible that you've done that sourcing and negotiation!

Hum interesting! We certainly want to serve folks just like you. We're actually thinking about hiring refrigerated vans and driving out on a route - with sufficient density it might work. Or maybe UPS the food?

Once you start overnighting the food you're competing with Goldbelly, which already has considerable scale but lacks focus and doesn't really have a defined "indulgent tasting menu experience" category (the dinners are there but you sort of have to find them yourself). You might be able to compete pretty well but I imagine the logistics get expensive quick with shipping and packaging. Plus you almost certainly will run into problems with shipping laws for alcohol pairings (same problem with driving into NJ, unfortunately), which in my mind is a key purchase driver that sets you apart from competitors.

This is a cool idea and something my wife and I will almost certainly use. DMing you some ideas about scalability that you're welcome to take or leave.

Cool thanks! I've tried Goldbelly and the issue is it's not 'fun' nor is it really nice. Seems there is a big focus on nostalgia, which is not what I'm after... it'll be interesting to see how things unfold

I've used Taste before and it worked really well. The quality of the food was high (we ordered from a NY restaurant we really liked) and putting together the "finishing touches" was the right amount of work. Made for a great date night at a price pt that was much lower than actually going to one of the restaurants.

This is great to hear! So happy you liked it.

Daryl here - I write a lot of our software, would appreciate any feedback or suggestions for the site, and would love to hear about your nice dinner needs :)

I filled out the request form for Austin, TX. I definitely think this would be popular here. Best of luck!

TL;DR: Personally Identifiable Information (PII) privacy practices and policy needs work.

---

PERSONA

Dual income, no kids, living in midtown, just S of Central Park. Miss these places, enjoyed being a regular at several on your list.

We want to use this service! From the menu link above, we enthusiastically planned orders for Friday, Sunday, and two days next week. (Really.)

Then we paused, since like many who are happy to spend Michelin meals money, we care about our privacy and PII data.

So we traced through Terms of Service to see what you do with our phone numbers.

TOS REVIEW

A few things gave me pause:

3(h) We may use your information for our legitimate business purposes deemed, in our sole discretion, to be essential to the continued operation of our business. Such needs may shift over time and new uses for such data will not require individual disclosure or approval.

This is what lawyers call "a hole you can drive a truck through". Actually, two of them.

4(a) We may share your information with our third-party service providers for certain business purposes. This information is provided in order for them to provide us services such as ... advertising services, marketing ...

The California section clarifies you definitely mean you will share my PII for 4(a) which includes advertising and marketing, not just 4(b) to provide the actual service. The laundry list in 4(a) are not all necessary to operate a business, should be split accordingly.

5) While we strive to protect your information, we cannot guarantee that your Personal Information is absolutely secure. Please keep this in mind when disclosing any information to Taste.

OK, I better watch out. How? There doesn't appear to be any info applicable to opting out of Taste sharing my mobile number to advertising or marketing databases, or using it to match shadow profiles (and inform those of my interest in Taste). You link to consumer information sites that relate to personalization/targeting on device identifiers, but not to you proactively using PII in ways I have a right to opt out of.

The California section re-iterates this, clarifying not only will you do whatever you want with my mobile number, you'll also keep it until you don't feel like it any more. :-)

My guess is you may have copied this legalese from somewhere or some lawyer gave you boilerplate to cover you and not the customer. I'd suggest that's a poor branding and positioning signal.

SUGGESTION BOX

I'd do a couple things: (1) put a big giant "[x] NEVER give my mobile number to any third party or use my mobile for any marketing or advertising beyond delivering my preferred menus by text" checkbox, and then figure out how to make that work, and (2) have someone rewrite this to be consumer PII friendly so it feels more respectful of up-market privacy concerns, with acknowledgment throughout that by ticking that Opt-Out box, no PII will be shared or used other than for billing and actual menu/food delivery notifications.

For borderline examples, since I'm mainly thinking about phone numbers, compare Hiya and Trucaller privacy policies.

Hiya is borderline. The advertising clause allows sharing PII "to third parties to market their products or services to you if you have consented to these disclosures". It's an important "if" unless they think they get to interpret it as the overall click-wrap assent.

Meanwhile Trucaller makes the preposterous claim that you can give other people's personal info (associating names with contact numbers) and are opting in for them. But more to this topic, they straight up promise to spam your mobile number: "We may use any of the information collected, as set out above, to provide You with location and interest based advertising, marketing messaging, information and services. We may contact You ... with information pertaining ... special offers, e.g. newsletter e-mails, SMS and similar notifications about ... our business partners’ [ed: advertiser] products and services."

But for something much better, see Nomorobo, which has the encouraging: "Your personal information is contained behind secured networks and is only accessible by a limited number of persons who have special access rights to such systems, and are required to keep the information confidential."* and then the much more interesting:

- We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information.

- We do not include or offer third-party products or services on our website.

- We do not allow third-party behavioral tracking.

That's a policy customers can feel comfortable with. Start there, and dial that back if you think your business model is more broken without it than the brand image value you earn by getting to say you don't exploit customers.

Did I mention we want to use Taste? You'll know where everyone with tasting menu money lives, make it safe.

A local restaurant to my parents (UK) has been doing similar things. Not Michelin starred, but close. It helps that their food has always typically been slow cooked, which always keeps better.

It’s a reasonable experience, but a way off eating at the restaurant. As a consumer, my motivation would be to support the restaurant, rather than to fully recreate the experience.

Yeah - I guess our audience is really people who find going to the restaurant challenging. Busy parents and people who are sick of the scene are our main diners.

Great idea. Could you explain what differentiates it from Tock? https://www.exploretock.com/ -- not that there isn't room for two solutions here, but just curious.

We've used Tock a few times in the way you described (recreate resto exp at home) and it's been awesome.

We compete. But Tock started as a reservations platform and shifted to delivery. We think nice dinners at home is a pretty different category so the solution may look very different - for example we have a Dining Notes feature that hosts playlists, finishing instructions, and plating photos.

Another core difference is we handle the customer support and offer the Taste Guarantee. Diners really love this because the experiences are higher priced so they want high touch service as well.

As the category expands we think there will be more and more nuanced but critical differences.

Congrats on your launch! I do believe that there exists some space between Blue Apron and Tock for this, however for me personally, the ease of the restaurant experience is a huge part of it's appeal. I can access high quality food via Tock & competitors but the added friction of being the sous-chef, garnisher, dishwasher, front of house, etc. makes this not really appeal to me once going to a restaurant becomes possible again.

Though I personally like the idea I don't really see the value in the long term.

In general, food services are in 5 categories.

1. Make it yourself, e.g. go to the grocery store, buy ingredients and prepare it yourself.

2. Buy prepared food, e.g. snacks, microwave meals, etc.

3. Buy service in which they prepare the food for you, e.g. restaurants.

Two new categories have been tried and failed throughout the years.

4. Buy service in which someone makes the food, at a specified location (2) + (3).

5. Buy unprepared and prepared food and make it yourself with instructions (1) + (2).

Generally (4) only makes sense and is cost effective in the catering context. (5) has failed spectacularly multiple times, most recently with Blue Apron. Unless this is somehow more cost effective than going to a restaurant (3) of similar quality because the chef doesn't have the overhead of a restaurant and passes the savings over I can't see this being successful long term or anything other than a very, very small niche. I can't imagine this ever being cheaper than a restaurant of the same quality (traveling is time that the chef will have to charge for or otherwise make up for in lower quality foods, it's a no-win situation).

The other issue is that something like this is going to be popular in an urban area, but urban areas are the same areas in which prospective customers will not have space, limiting the number of people they can host (+ the chef) meaning they would gravitate more and more towards just going to a restaurant inherently (the dining experience generally is more fun with more participants, to a point).

Personally, though (5) has never been done successfully, I think that's the next big thing. If someone can figure out the food distribution and partner with grocery stores and get some famous chefs at pre-scheduled times to cook food with people live (the same foods that have been distributed to the customers) it could work.

Yeah (5) is where we are exploring. There's basically a spectrum between groceries and cooking to sitting at a restaurant.

Taste is 'precooked and de-constructed' so all the condiments, and crunchy stuff is separate. Finishing instructions include oven for 3-5 mins and plating. We found this hits the quality vs. effort tradeoffs best for busy people just outside of cities.

5 has also succeeded in the supermarket - just not as a separate business. Take & bake is in most grocery stores these days.

Had something similar back in December from Los Angeles restaurant, Vespertine. We got the separate components for all the dishes and then heated and plated them ourselves. It was a great experience!

This is a different package than what we had, but should serve as an example of what to expect from Vespertine (https://www.exploretock.com/vespertine/experience/261739/men...)

Yeah right now you get a sporadic one here and there and we're trying to make it a consistent experience all in one place. Reminds me of early days when I started using airbnb - I was also randomly doing this on craigslist...

Vespertine is simply magical, highly recommend it to anyoen who wants to push the boundaries of experiential dining/molecular gastronomy (in-person).

You didn't mention the best part in my experience... each dish had a QR code sticker that you scanned and it pulled up an evocative image and story of how they meticulously chose those ingredients and the story behind the dish and why they chose it/ties into the theme of the overall 8+ course meal.

Please scan the QR codes, it makes the experience feel way more intimate and connected like you are talking to the head chef and team directly!

This is a really good idea.

Interesting concept - I've thought much on this, and really as with all meal things, it's a cultural phenomenon, not a convenience phenomenon. You have the opportunity to make that shift if you so choose and buck the delivery/minimal prep/... trend.

Too many have tried to make luxury experiences 'easy' - which is antithetical to the experience. Don't succumb to that 'scalability' urge if you can.

How do meals compare with eating in an actual restaurant? I've been ordering takeout a little more since the pandemic began, and I've had disappointing meals. Bad estimates mean that I might pick up the meal late, and it didn't always microwave well.

The food photographs really well, and I'd like to try it. But I'm assuming that it's priced high enough that I would not want there to be a hit in quality.

Generally we've gotten rave reviews on the quality and people have fun doing the finishing instructions. We have a satisfaction guarantee so if you're not happy we will make it right.

That's cool, I'll have to try it out when it's in the bay area.

I'm about to attempt:

https://www.exploretock.com/alinea/experience/253381/alineas...

Feel free to reach out and I'll provide feedback.

What do "finishing instructions" mean exactly? There's a big difference between something like "now sprinkle this spice packet" and "now cook this raw steak."

All the dishes are pre-cooked. So it's just oven or microwave. It really feels like the instagram of food, where it's super easy to put together but gives you a nice result.

Looks promising! I was hoping you could shed some light on "using some of the latest NLP techniques". Wish you success!

So the menus rotate about once per month for most restaurants. And all of a sudden diners have to scroll through a ton of menus to find something they want. We can't use item-to-item collaborative filter because we always have a sparse data problem on the new menus.

So instead we are trying to create NLP embeddings on the menus and then ranking new menus based on similarity to old menus the diner liked.

Does this dovetail with "tasting menu spenders" interest in exploring novel tastes?

For some categories of interests, the best approaches branch out rather than converge in.

Also, many find perusing menus a positive part of the experience, like choosing a place to go on a trip.

Love the idea! Is there a place to signup yo get notified when you arrive in SF?

Hi there! Yup there is a request Taste link on the homepage, also here for convenience: https://form.jotform.com/201998377891172

Love the concept - would love to try this out once you launch in europe

just wanted to say I love the idea! Would definitely use it if it was available in Croatia :)

Btw, how are you solving routing right now, any cool algorithms? :)

Cool!

I do get an error when I try to change the zipcode to 19103 fyi.

Ooo, seems we have a caching issue. Working on a fix...

Just pushed up the fix! Let me know if it works? Although we're not yet operating in 19103 - so it won't be particularly exciting - but thanks! Excited to expand to your ZIP soon.

what is your long term plan? Assuming that we are finished with Covid in 1-2 years, will people still be interested in this?

we think the demand has always been there, because busy people who are just out of reach of food hubs have to do a lot of work to access the great restaurants. (reservation, babysitter, train/uber cost, travel time, worried about getting home, etc)

at a society level, everything is moving into the home (movies, workouts) so we think diners would want to move nice dinners into the home too.

I wish you the best of luck and see a short-term need, but as someone deeply entangled into gastronomic subculture I would hate to see the experience of being hosted by a gastronomer and gastronomic team fade away. Going to your favourite restaurant or to a new, "fancy" place is just as much an experience in hospitality as it is in culinary.

Thanks! And yeah we totally agree nothing will replace the restaurant. But what about all the folks who are busy and find it hard to access the food. We're making it for them so access to nice food can be democratized.

I would love a "lite" version of this service that delivers menus and some basic recipes for the featured items on the menu to either my email or SMS.

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