dealmak3r

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

This is a really good idea.

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.

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.

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...

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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!