Ever Want Your Own Restaurant? Here’s Your Chance

We’re loathe to call things the “Airbnb of…” dog-biscuits, chessboards, whatever. We are sure peer-to-peer marketplaces have a prelapsarian past, but few enterprises have made purchasing services from your friends and neighbors as easy as Airbnb. So unfortunately, we have to designate a great new venture called Feastly the, ahem, Airbnb of restaurants.

Feastly allows chefs and gourmands to transform their homes into their own restaurants without all that overhead and investment of a traditional restaurant. Conversely, it allows diners an alternative to the traditional restaurant.

It’s pretty simple: As a chef, you register on Feastly’s site. You determine the menu, the price, the date, how many feasters you can handle, etc. Feastly fills the seats, handles money and takes a modest administrative 12% cut.

As a diner, you browse and sign up for dinners in your area (right now, their main markets are Washington DC, NYC and San Francisco). More than just a restaurant, the Feastly experience awards diners with home-cooked meals and a unique social experience, or as Feastly cofounder Noah Karesh put it, “The dining table is the optimal social network.”

We’ve been using Feastly chefs to cater the LifeEdited dinner parties and are very impressed with the quality of food and service.

We asked Mr Karesh some other questions about how Feastly started and how it works.

Why did you start Feastly?

Feastly came from my travels to Lake Atitlan,Guatemala. I was struck by my inability to find authentic, local food there and convinced a local to invite me over for dinner. Sitting around his family’s table, I had my “a-ha” moment realizing that it shouldn’t be so hard to eat local food and meet people when traveling. Feastly was born over Start-Up Weekend DC in November 2012 and a year later, we’ve hosted hundreds of meals for thousands of Feasters. One of my many goals with the platform is to bring Feastly to Lake Atitlan.

Do you know ahead of time what will be served? Can you make requests?

Yes, our chefs post menus online ahead of time so that Feasters can search for their favorite dishes or chefs. For those with food restrictions, our chefs do their best to cater to any food issues. Thanks to our feedback forms, chefs can receive immediate feedback on their meals and get ideas from Feasters for future meals and how to improve the overall user experience.

How much do dinners typically cost?

Our meals range from ice cream tastings to brunch to seven course dinners and may range from $5-200 with the average meal costing $38.50 [booze is sometimes, but not always, included in price.]

Do you think your approach could replace going out to a standard restaurant?

Yes, but even more than just replacing people’s reliance on restaurants to “eat out,” we are increasingly serving as a social network for our Feasters. Our users come for the food, but increasingly stay due to the positive relationships they are building around the dinner table. We’ve helped to introduce couples, business partners, friends and activity partners over meals.

What about markets you don’t serve yet? How can people get involved?

We’ve been excited to see so much positive feedback in NY and DC and soon SF, and we get emails daily from people around the world encouraging us to open in their cities. Like our peers at Airbnb, we are eager and working to expand globally, so that we can bring the best of Feastly everywhere. We are also eager to bring on more chefs, and like to work with local partners eager to bring Feastly to their communities. We’re always open to new ideas and partnerships and it’s best to reach out at info@eatfeastly.com.

Read the article here.

It’s about that time…

The supper class

Young New Yorkers are ditching the potluck for elaborate dinner parties

By Sara Stewart

What’s the secret to a memorable New York dinner party? For Paul Wagtouicz, 39, and his boyfriend Noah Fecks, 38, it’s carefully choosing recipes from one of the 815 issues of Gourmet magazine they’ve collected — that’s every one ever published, from 1941 to 2009 — cooking multiple courses from scratch to perfection and serving them by candlelight in their Alphabet City “micro-studio.”

“We do one issue a week,” says Wagtouicz, who works as a food photographer and estimates it will take him and Fecks more than 15 years to get through every issue.

Gone are the days when one might simply boil some pasta, whip up a basic tomato sauce, heat some bread, invite pals over and call it a feast. If you’re going to compete with the awesome, ever-multiplying culinary hot spots in New York where your friends could be eating — but aren’t because they came all the way over to your place, a major slog from the subway station on a chilly night — you’d better be prepared to dazzle them with a gourmet meal, perfectly mixed cocktails and heady themes and conceits.

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© NOAH FECKS + PAUL WAGTOUICZ

Noah Fecks (in cap) picks recipes from vintage issues of Gourmet for his multicourse dinner parties.

“A dinner party might need to be a little bit more thoughtful than it used to,” cautions Geoff Bartakovics, founder and CEO of the daily food-and-drink-culture newsletter Tasting Table. “These days everyone is watching food television, subscribing to magazines and eating at great fancy-casual restaurants,” he says. “They simply know more. So I think you do need to try a little harder.”

Web producer Laura Ratliff, 23, certainly puts some effort into it when she and her boyfriend host dinner parties with high-end dishes, often ones they’ve had eating out.

“When my guests come over, they’ll be served what I would eat, which happens to be better than what 90 percent of people eat,” she boasts. “The last party, we did five courses — we went a little all-out with it.”

The evening started out with an appetizer of scallops in an herbed broth with baby radishes and ended with a dessert of caramelized roasted pineapple with creme fraiche. They went so far as to move their furniture out of the living room to fit a rented dinner table.

The rise of such high-maintenance dinner parties is part of a larger trend: More New Yorkers are staying in and cooking. According to the 2013 Zagat Survey, city dwellers are cooking at home (6.7 times per week on average) more than eating out (6.4 times per week) — for the first time since Zagat started tracking the data seven years ago.

Of course, that’s partly due to economics, but it also seems to reflect a desire for a more intimate dining experience, says Noah Karesh of Feastly, an online service that helps connect dinner-party experts with wannabe hosts.

“We have this whole movement away from the traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant, like with pop-up [restaurants] and food trucks,” he says. “People want to feel closer to their food. And restaurants can lack a sense of dynamic-ness, a sense of authenticity.”

When Brooklynite Jess Kantor, head of marketing and content for livestream.com, has a dinner party, it’s rarely lacking in those qualities. Two years ago, she and her friends started a regular gourmet gathering they cheekily dubbed “Chez Bushwick.”

“We would get together at noon on a Saturday, cook for four or five hours, make a huge mess and then people would bring more food and booze,” Kantor, 31, recalls. “The first couple of them, we would finish with Valrhona-spiked hot chocolate and homemade marshmallows.”

“Chez Bushwick” has since expanded from intimate loft dinners to sprawling, epic meals that sometimes move outside the city.

“A big group of us recently went out to our friend’s lake house, about 25 of us, and it was like a Food Network challenge,” she says. “The fun of it is, like, this beautiful chaos. There’s no way we could do it in a restaurant.”

For another country dinner, she relays an even more idyllic scene: “We had a bunch of architects in the group, and they constructed a huge long table while we were cooking. I kneaded bread overnight and made it in the fire. We cooked fish on the fire, and did a big kale vegetable salad and roasted potatoes,” she says. “We had the most epic dinner party.”

But, as lovely as such gatherings may be, the epic dinner party “can turn into a kind of brinksmanship,” says Tasting Table’s Bartakovics, who claims his parties can intimidate guests who then won’t cook for him, fearing their kitchen skills will fail to match his.

To that end, he doesn’t consider it a victory — or a great party — when people tell him they’d never dare invite him over to their place in return. “That’s the opposite of what the dinner party is supposed to engender!”

Tips for the perfect dinner party

Tasting Table CEO and expert host Geoff Bartakovics shares his tips for hosting with elegance and ease.

* Keep calm: “Chill out,” says Bartakovics. “The intention here is not to impress anybody but to create an environment in which your guests can relax.”

* Pour generously: “You have to have a very strong cocktail ready to go . . . So within five minutes of people arriving they can take the edge off,” he says. Then, “it doesn’t matter what you’re serving.”

* Avoid the cheese plate: He advises against “plopping” a self-serve appetizer in the middle of the cocktail table. “People can have a little apprehension about grabbing stuff and not looking like a pig.”

* Embrace the one-pot meal: “Any kind of braised anything you can do . . . [so it can] sit in the oven or a Dutch oven until you serve it — those are your slam-dunks. You can prep it the night before.”

* Never leave ’em wanting more: “Don’t [let guests] go home hungry. It’s a cardinal sin if someone leaves one of my parties and stops off for a cheeseburger on the way home.”

We’re excited to be part of the mesh 2013, a global gathering and cultural immersion in the sharing economy ecosystem and community. mesh2013 brings together the instigators – entrepreneurs, designers, city planners, engineers, makers, artists, doers, dreamers, proto-typers and futurists – those actively building products, services, policies, and communities. We are experimenting relentlessly with new forms of access, openness, business models, delight delivery and enriching our world. It’s time to rethink and re-emerge together.

Learn more here.

From the TaskRabbit blog:

Life Edited and Feastly Throw a Dinner Party (With a Little Help From TaskRabbit)

How to Throw an Excellent Dinner Party
By Roseanne Pereira of Brooklyn Based, November 15, 2012

Not long ago I had a bunch of people over for a meal that had me pulling charcoal-black chicken thighs from a cast iron skillet.  The evening also involved my smoke alarm going off and a portion of the guests rising from their seats to help me fan the alarm. I had decided to host because I wanted a distraction from my obsessive presidential poll reading. I got one.

“There’s something very intimate about a home, “ says Noah Karesh, co-founder of Feastly, a site that connects people through social experiences related to food. “People have 5000 friends on Facebook, but they are still eating dinner alone.” He calls inviting people into your home, especially if they don’t know everyone else there, “an act of trust.” Kim Severson, Atlanta bureau chief for the The New York Times and co-author, with Julia Moskin, of the recently published Cook Fight, has noticed another peculiarity–that New Yorkers may know all about cereal milk panna cotta and how to make their own pickles, but it’s still “a revelation when someone makes an actual dinner.” In all our chef and restaurant worship, it seems we’ve overlooked the art of entertaining at home with a meal that doesn’t require a sous vide set-up (or a sous chef).

Well, after my too-fried chicken experience, I wanted a revelation of my own. And with Thanksgiving approaching, it seemed that I wouldn’t be the only one searching for better, less stressful ways to invite people into my home for a meal. So I gathered some tips from seasoned hosts and cooks, then went ahead and invited some friends over for dinner. Here’s what I learned.

Menu Daydreams
It’s ok to be ambitious when you’re dreaming up what you might make. At least, in the beginning.

Severson says that when she plans her menu, she’s basically just thinking about what she wants to eat. “If I make something I like, it will taste better; I will be invested…If I’m kicking my own ass, I might as well do it for something I want to eat.”

For Ronna Welsh of Purple Kale Kitchenworks, this brainstorming period is about indulgence. Once you have your ideas in mind, she recommends bouncing them off someone whose taste you admire and “who wants you to pull off the party of your life.”

Most of the experts I spoke with said that hosts should always cook what they know for their parties–and that it’s when people attempt some new or fancy recipe that they run into problems. However, there are ways to combine novelty and fun with something within your skill set as a cook. If you do decide to venture into newer territory, limit it to a small portion of your menu. Maybe choose a dish that is richer and more decadent than you would make for yourself, but is a fairly simple recipe (like this ridiculously good caramelized garlic tart from the cookbook Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi). Or, if can’t stop yourself from attempting something that you’ve never made, at least go for something hard to mess up, for instance a classic, slow-cooked dish that you can prepare well in advance.

Dulce de leche can be made well in advance and reheated. And it’s cool.

Praise for the Braise
Certain styles of food are just easier for dinner parties. Kate Payne, whose book The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking champions creative ways to make living spaces cozy enough to entertain, advises staying away from dishes where, “everyone has to have their own piece of chicken.” For an easy, affordable one-bowl meal, she opts for soup and homemade bread.

Similarly, Kara Masi, host of Ted & Amy’s Supper Club, said that her most consistent crowd pleasers are dishes that do not need pan-searing, frying or sautéing near the end of cooking. Favorite entrees include roast chicken (“looks fancy”) and mussels (“so easy to cook, always affordable”). For desserts, Masi prefers pre-portioned desserts made a day ahead–panna cotta, cheesecake, flan–served in ramikens, which are cheap not very space consuming–so they are ready to go without fuss.

“Don’t discount the beef bourguignon” or a “lovely bowl of stew,” adds Severson, who is a huge fan of braising meats ahead of time–as is Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal. Addressing the wonders of slow-cooked meat in her book, she writes, “It will sit calmly, as everyone settles into the evening, and let you sit calmly with them rather than standing worriedly in another room.”

Prep lists are an essential tool for a smooth evening.

Prep, the Gift of Sanity
I know, I know. Everyone tells you to do some tasks ahead of time, but for hosting a big meal (and this is going to be especially helpful for Thanksgiving next week), it’s critical. Once you’ve combed through those beautiful cookbooks and daydreamed to your heart’s content, Welsh advises to take some, “nerdy, fastidious steps that a lot of people would avoid.” This means everything from creating a master prep list that merges the similar ingredients across your entire menu, to mapping out your prep schedule day by day (larger tasks first!), to thinking through your party all the way to the end–seeing for example, if you’ll have enough containers for your courses. (If you think you might come up short, she suggests putting post-its in bowls with the name of the dish that will soon be in them). Welsh’s tips make what you have to do visible.

Welsh says that the advance prep is “not just about frontloading the work.” As she explains on her blog, “If five recipes require onions, you want to clean your cutting board, sharpen your knife, and peel and slice them only once, rather than each separate time.” So, ultimately, it’s about having the work you do count for more than one dish, saving yourself time, and giving yourself “a load of sanity.”

The entree: rice, chicken curry, fiery sweet potatoes (from Cook Fight) and chickpea stew.

A Sinkside Set-up and other Social Tips
Dinner parties are all about bringing together your most interesting friends, right? Well, as much as you love them, part of your job as host is to smooth and cultivate the social scene, even if you think they can work it out themselves. Severson asserts that crowd control at a dinner party is key. For instance, making the most of guests who upon arrival, ask what they can do to help.

“Manage those people. That is essential,” she says, “Cope with them.”

She leaves small tasks for those guests to do, which is both helpful to the host, and makes the guests feel at ease and at home. Adler also purposely leaves some small tasks for her guests to do–picking herbs, slicing bread, and opening wine. She writes, “By letting people pick herbs or slice bread instead of bringing a salad, you make your kitchen a universe in which you can give completely and ask for help. The more environments with that atmospheric makeup we can find or create, the better.”

For Adler, this also extends to sometimes letting guests have at it if they offer to do the dishes at the end of a meal, “especially if there is flirting, “ she says. “A good place to set people up is at the sink.”

In terms of set-ups, Severson says there’s also nothing wrong with asking a good friend attending the dinner to be a plant–in charge of posing interesting questions if an awkward silence descends. And Payne says it pays to have someone else on the scene to co-host with you–to take coats, show people where drinks are, while your brain might be spinning. She also advises space-constrained New Yorkers to become friends with their neighbors, because you never know when you’ll need to borrow that extra chair.

Tease, Please–But No Cheese
When people arrive, give them something to eat. As Welsh puts it, “not something that fills you up, but something that teases you.” She doesn’t see the point of cheese plate at the beginning of the meal because it’s filling your guests with what you put little effort into. A homemade herbed butter on thin toasts would be a lighter, but still tasty, option. Adler suggests customizing olives by draining them of brine, and heating them with citrus peel, a bit of spice and olive oil. Moskin and Severson elevate crudite by making radish cups topped with butter, anchovies and herbs or serving Mexican snacks like chili-spiced peanuts or jicama with chili powder, lime juice and zest.

So how did it all work out, using tips from the most gracious hosts around? My own advice is that prepping really works. If you are driven to host, you may have (like me) an invincibility complex and find yourself swapping recipes and creating bigger and better visions of dishes even as you get closer to the event. Actually writing out your prep work and taping it up for you to see is a huge reality check. And it is immensely satisfying to cross off the items with a bold black Sharpie. People differ on how well they can stick to these sheets (really, check out Ronna Welsh’s blog post on prep for an in-depth primer), but regardless of your style, do prep.

I would definitely add more about drinks on my prep lists–in particular, making sure there was plenty of water and a nice drink for non-alcohol drinkers. My party was during the work week, so it just makes good sense.

Also, dessert is definitely the course I run out of time on and if I have it at all, is usually store bought. For this dinner party, I used a molasses gingerbread cake from Cook Fight. It was so easy and guests raved about it. Also, Severson has a bit in there about simmering a can of sweetened condensed milk to make your own cheap dulce de leche. I thought it was so Mr. Wizard to be simmering a can during dinner. When I did it and drizzled it over my friends’ cake, I was thrilled. Every dinner party benefits from that kind of play or wonder.

I also realized this time around how much the host’s attitude has an impact on the guests; what’s most important is the shared experience of the gathering. So while cooking, when I found myself at a crossroads (those moments where you could go one way and spend extra time in a pursuit of perfectionism or the other and chat with a guest), I actively decided to not stress out and instead trust that people are mostly happy being fed. In other words, I erred on the side of good fun.

And finally, one last piece of level-headed advice from Severson.

Love Means Never Having to Say Your Sorry
The ultimate tip is to remember that people are just happy to be invited. “Never apologize, “ says Severson. “If your mousse doesn’t set, say it’s a chocolate sauce.”

Read the article here.

From DCist.com

Capital Area Food Bank Manager Becomes First Local Winner of Food Network’s Chopped

By Martin Austermuhle, November 15, 2012

You may already know our wonderful Community Manager and Chef Extraordinaire Grace Lichaa. She is a recent Chopped Champion, a manager at the Capital Area Food Bank, a D.C. Farmer’s Market all-star and one of our favorite chefs.

We sat down with Grace to learn more about her cooking, inspirations and recipes.

How did you start cooking with Feastly?

I love to cook. I used to cook in restaurants and I cook a lot for my friends. I thought it would be really interesting to be cooking for strangers.

What do you do in your everyday life? 

I work at the Capital Area Food Bank. I run our kids program. We provide food for children when schools are out.

You were recently on an episode of Chopped. What was that experience like?

Amazing. They did a non-profit episode. It aired for the first time on Election Day and they will be broadcasting it a couple times. It was amazing to be able to cook for chefs who are so talented. Also, the chefs who I was competing against were all non profit chefs who work at different food banks across the county. I felt honored to be there. I’m trying to parlay the viewing into a fundraiser for the food bank I work at.

How did you begin cooking? Was food a part of your family life growing up or did you learn to cook on your own?

Both my parents are from Egypt and my Mom is an amazing cook. When I became a vegetarian, the stuff my mom was cooking for me was not great. She would literally put raw tofu and green beans together. So, I kind of just started cooking for myself. About a year ago, I started eating meat again and it’s been really interesting to cook for people who eat meat in a way that really highlights the vegetables.

What is your absolute favorite thing to cook?

Oh gosh, that’s a really hard question! I think it depends what time of the year it is. I really like to cook what’s seasonal. My favorite thing ever is strawberry shortcake or baklava. With baklava, I learned the basics from my mom but I changed it to incorporate different farmer’s market ingredients, like lavender or different citrus flavors. I like to make classics more local and modern.

Can you share a recipe with us?

Bam.

Curry Chic Pea Soup

This quick vegan soup is delicious and a complete meal when served over a bowl of rice.

Total Time: 20 minutes
Serves 4-6

1 yellow onion, diced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 28- oz can of garbanzo beans
1 28 oz can of diced tomatoes ( I like the Muir Glen fire roasted tomatoes)
6 cups of vegetable stock or water
1 bunch of spinach (about ¾ of a pound), washed and roughly chopped
1 Tablespoon of olive oil
2 Tablespoon of good curry powder
2 teaspoons of coriander
1 Tablespoon of salt
½ bunch of cilantro, washed
2 limes cut into wedges

In a large pot, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion, garlic, curry powder, coriander, and salt
and sauté for 2-3 minutes. Add ¼ cup of vegetable stock and continue to cook the onions and garlic
until the onion is translucent, about 5 more minutes. Add the canned tomatoes (with liquid), garbanzo
beans, and vegetable stock. Cook until heated and the flavors have combined, stirring on occasion,
about 10minutes. Use the immersion blender to puree the soup*. Turn off the heat and add the
spinach and chopped cilantro. The heat should cook the spinach. Serve with a squeeze of lime over rice.

For a slightly chunky soup remove half the soup into another bowl and puree. Then put back
into the pot.

Noah Karesh will be a panelist at DCWEEK for “The Share Economy.” He is the cofounder of Feastly, which lets diners have a unique meal in a cook’s home, and co-owner of the Blind Dog Cafe, a pop-up daytime cafe in Washington, DC. DCWEEK is a week-long festival co-produced by Tech Cocktail and iStrategyLabs. Get your tickets here.

Tech Cocktail: What was the inspiration behind Feastly? 

Noah Karesh: Feastly came to me while traveling. I have always explored other places and cultures through food. During a trip to Lake Atitlan in Guatemala with my girlfriend, I was struck with the lack of authentic food. It seemed like every restaurant was offering hamburgers and pizza, and we wanted local food. Rather than settle for a restaurant, we convinced a local to invite us in for a home-cooked meal. At that moment, I thought, it shouldn’t be so hard to find homemade meals around the world. That is when the idea for Feastly was born.

I brought the concept to Startup Weekend DC in November 2011 and, along with my cofounder Danny Harris, built out the site with a team of fellow eating and technology enthusiasts. In January 2012, Danny’s mom came down from New York to cook our first Feastly dinner, a traditional Libyan meal for 25. We have now hosted over a hundred meals across DC and NYC, and we’re working to bring Feastly everywhere, including Lake Atitlan.

Tech Cocktail: How does Feastly fit in with the sharing economy? 

Karesh: Feastly is at the core of the sharing economy. We empower chefs to monetize their un- or underused skills by expanding our eating options from the one million restaurants in the US to the 150 million homes. Our chefs are making money, building their brands, and being featured on the likes of The Food Network, Washington Post, NPR, and others. Moreover, we believe that breaking bread together is more than simply a tool for nourishment – it is the vehicle through which we create and sustain community. Feastly’s mission is to reintroduce the dining room table as the original social network with three simple ingredients: a comfortable home setting, good food, and real people. We work closely with our siblings in the sharing space, and have developed partnerships with Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Uber, among others.

Tech Cocktail: You’re also the co-owner of Blind Dog Cafe. What’s that and how did it come about? 

Karesh: I would consider myself a coffee shop connoisseur! I, like many, have spent a large chunk of my entrepreneurial and academic careers working from coffee shops. To me, the coffee shop is the ideal third place. While the city has some great places, it also has many coffee shop deserts. Using the lessons of the sharing economy, I worked with two friends to convert a bar, Darnell’s, which was closed during the day, into a vibrant coffee shop, The Blind Dog Cafe. It’s a great symbiotic relationship, and also a model for other entrepreneurs looking to solve other urban deserts with limited resources. It is a perfect place to work, meet friends, and get a delicious cup of coffee.

Tech Cocktail: What makes the DC startup scene unique? 

Karesh: In DC, we support each other. I’m always amazed at the number of people who have offered their time, wisdom, rolodex, and check books to support Feastly. The city takes a lot of pride in its home-grown talent and businesses, and we are proud to continue putting DC on the map as we expand our reach to New York and beyond.

Tech Cocktail: What are you most looking forward to at DCWEEK? 

Karesh: Feastly is all about disrupting the food space. As such, I am excited to meet and listen to others changing our thinking and consumption patterns in other areas. Specifically, Eric Koester of Zaarly is a mentor, and someone thinking radically different about how we get things locally and the power of the peer-to-peer marketplace.

Candy corn cookie bark

Candy corn macaroons

Candy corn cupcakes

Candy corn meringues

Candy corn pudding

Candy corn rice crispy treats

And if you really want to go overboard with the candy corn this Halloween maybe try out this hair style. Not exactly food porn but still definitely fits with the theme if you are enjoying the candy corn inspiration.

Either way have a great Halloween and stay safe during the hurricane!