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!