While this is an interesting idea, restaurants are booming right now. In many cities you also see the proliferation of cheap(ish) tasting/dégustation menus, and higher end food in more casual settings. If the choice is between a 60-70 dollar menu in someone's home vs. 60-70 dollar menu at a restaurant, I think the restaurant wins most of the time.
Then there's the fact that this is basically illegal in much (most?) of the US, Canada, and likely elsewhere. You can't prepare meals for the public without the food being prepared in an inspected and licensed establishment. Just like you can't run a hotel without the proper permits.
Also, as a side note, I was a cook/chef for 10 years (now an older university student), my last gig being a head chef job in a fine dining restaurant. I've toyed with the idea of starting a food-related business. I would personally love to be able to serve people in my home instead of spending $100,000+ (actually more like $500,000) on a small restaurant, or $50,000 on a food truck or other mobile establishment.
But allowing unlicensed establishments to operate opens up a huge can of worms - what happens to businesses who pay thousands of dollars in taxes, who buy liquor licenses often for upwards of $100,000, who are forced to pay exorbitant amounts of money to build a kitchen which follows the various health codes? Will they be compensated? Will the meal-sharers be forced to upgrade their kitchens? Will they be inspected?
We have to decide, as a society, if we want to allow businesses to operate in residential areas. We can't simply encourage people to break the law because it makes some guy with an app money...
> We have to decide, as a society, if we want to allow businesses to operate in residential areas. We can't simply encourage people to break the law because it makes some guy with an app money...
I really thought where you were going here was not about zoning, but was going to be "We have to decide, as a society, if we want to undo a couple centuries' worth of public health regulations because it makes some guy with an app money... "
That's a stawman, nobody's using these apps to make some guy with an app money. Users are on them because it's convenient and fun to have your neighbor cook an extra few portions of what they're having without necessarily doing the dinner party thing or owing them a meal back. Also, like we're seeing with airbnb, the sharing economy doesn't undo regulations, they just demand new types of regulation. I totally agree that there's a food safety concern with these services, I just don't think we should dismiss them entirely because they don't fit well with our current style of regulating restaurants. For example, a single unsterile kitchen in the food-sharing economy presents an order of magnitude less risk than a high throughput restaurant because they serve an order of magnitude less food. It's a slightly different potato, but if we can manage to peel it there are enormous gains to be had in terms of health and community -- just imagine if a healthy home-cooked dinner was as cheap and convenient as picking up a family meal from KFC or take-out chinese food.
At the same time we have to remember these apps exist for a reason.. to make a small group of people money. In the quest to accomplish this goal marketing, combined with PR, government relations, and legal, attempt to manipulate society in such a way that society will conform to the goals of the business. If we forget this, either intentionally or due to ignorance, we become much more susceptible to manipulation which may or may not be detrimental to us.
I disagree with the premise that these apps exist to make a small group of people money...
1) Nobody's working on this kind of stuff just for the money, and if they are then they've lied to a lot of people and are fucking up. If you're a strong engineer with good quantitative skills, the expected value of working on wall street, working at googazonsoft, or even becoming a realtor in the bay (if you have the soft skills) is much higher than striking out on your own to create something new. A technical founder I met from one of these companies could have easily done one of these other things but felt really passionate about improving our relationship to food. I really doubt there's a money grubbing evil genius working on food sharing apps in order to amass great wealth and power.
2) You can't really manipulate society with $50M of facebook ads and no product (and I think that's more than any of these companies have raised). If you're making a consumer app and it's not something people want, there's no "marketing, combined with PR, government relations, and legal" that's going to get them to use it and "conform to the goals of the business".
IDK, maybe I'm just a dumb optimist but I'm excited about what the future holds for this stuff.
> If you're a strong engineer with good quantitative skills, the expected value of working on wall street, working at googazonsoft, or even becoming a realtor in the bay (if you have the soft skills) is much higher than striking out on your own to create something new.
With an essentially zero chance of becoming a billionaire.
If you're driven by the desire to become a billionaire, startups it is.
He is also a US Senator's son and took advantage of his family's many connections to get his startup capital. He was also born at the right time to take advantage of postwar prosperity.
Without those advantages, it's almost laughable to replicate that career path
I happily grant you that what I wrote looked like a strawman, and read out of context it was. However, I used the "to make a small group of people money" bit as a piece of euphony, paralleling the original sentence construction of the poster to whom I was replying. The entire point of my parallel - the only point - was not about someone profiting, but rather that I think the important element is the massive public health concern, not about zoning regulation.
That said, I disagree completely and vehemently with most of what you said. Allow me to respond to what I believe the salient pieces were. I'll rephrase for brevity, but please let me know if I've mis-represented your position in doing so:
1 - "Sharing economy doesn't undo regulations, they just demand new types." To date, we haven't seen the sharing economy demand "new types" of regulations; we've seen it completely ignore existing regulations and lobby against any replacement, even where those regulations are reasonable (e.g., requiring commercial drivers to have commercial auto insurance, w/r/t Uber).
2 - "Don't fit well ... not a reason to dismiss them entirely." That is a strawman. I did not advocate for dismissing them entirely. I don't generally advocate for eliminating viable business models out of bureaucratic laziness. The current situation, however, is "ignore public health regulations until we kill enough people to draw attention to ourselves." That is not an acceptable road forward under any circumstance, and being adamantly opposed to it is not the same as being entirely opposed to the existence of an "uber for chefs", or whatever we're calling it.
3- I disagree about the "order of magnitude" argument. It's rather like dismissing an Uber approach to user safety on the argument that each driver is just one driver. We must address it as the entire service, which collectively - if it scales, and let's be fair, scaling is the point - would end up serving enormous numbers of people.
4- "Imagine if healthy, home-cooked dinner was cheap and convenient." An appeal to pathos. Largely irrelevant to the discussion, and also to the services as they exist(which generally involve sit-down meals for groups of people at fairly immodest prices).
> "Imagine if healthy, home-cooked dinner was cheap and convenient." An appeal to pathos. Largely irrelevant to the discussion, and also to the services as they exist(which generally involve sit-down meals for groups of people at fairly immodest prices).
Here's one from the OP that's starting with affordable stuff (users price, kind of like sidecar): https://josephine.com/
I think what they're doing is pretty cool and I've heard it's mostly busy parents buying the meals. Hope they come to LA soon as I'd love to try some of the yummy smells I pick up walking around Echo Park in the evening! (sorry for the pathos?)
I don't think there need be any cognitive dissonance between the ideas that A) anyone running a business is going to skirt/avoid any regulation they can get away with and B) existing regulation is not designed to be reasonable for the realities of the app-economy.
In other words, new startups pushing the envelope should be expected, and there's nothing wrong with that. We just have to decide as a society how far they should be able to code and adapt the regulation accordingly.
If Chesterton had seen modern laws (and he was already quite vocal for the proliferation of BS laws back in his day) he would never have brought forward his "fence" argument.
Really, a huge numbers of modern laws and restrictions are as far removed from utility as possible.
And unlike in "Chesterton's fence" case, it's not like they are old and we don't know why they come up with them back in the day.
Quite the opposite. We DO know why the come with them, and for a lot of them, we witnessed lobby groups and special interests, concerned citizens "think of the children", etc press for them -- and it has been mostly BS.
You are speaking in broad generalities about a specific and narrow topic. Could you please clarify what public health / food sanitation laws you feel are the one-sided product of lobbyists and special interests and have no "Chesterton's Fence"-type value to speak of?
We have a share of BS laws in Europe too, that killed small producers with "safety regulations" and requirements designed so that only big buck corps can afford them -- despite having no issues whatsoever with said producers' products for centuries up until the 1990s or so when the laws got drafted...
I can't speak to the zoning restrictions meaningfully as it's outside my area of expertise. But as to the food law example:
Well, that's not an example of a lobbyist-sponsored food law. The FDA has old regs on the books about the maximum number of mites/cheese sample, apparently written for "cheeses at large," to limit the dissemination of contaminated food, rather than one specific type of intentionally mite-ridden cheese. A single instance of a border check resulted in an imported shipment was recorded. In that article, the border control "wouldn't specify what the safe level was." It took 30 seconds to find that the regulatory level is 6 mites / cc, and that the samples they examined exceeded that, some by up to ~660x. This was not part of a broader law or effort on the behalf of the FDA, and future shipments of the cheese got through import checks just fine. Literally, the media and the media alone made up a storm in a teacup over an "attack" on small oversea dairies.
The obvious corollary to your statement is "in practice the only way you can affirm the law is to throw enough people in jail for breaking it." So do we throw more people who break food safety laws in jail, or pat them on the back?
Not really. How many Uber customers went to jail? There are tens of thousands of laws, but almost everyone in prison is there for breaking the same 20 or so.
Some zoning laws also have safety implications. If dine-sharing apps take off, I expect the trajectory to quickly go from “sharing a meal with a neighbour” to “running a full-time restaurant out of your house.”
Both Uber and AirBnB have followed this arc. Uber even gives preference to drivers who work full-time.
Zoning is related to building codes. All the rules around waste disposal, fire codes, and so forth are dramatically different between a restaurant and a private home. And the financial incentives with a “dine-sharing” business will be to ignore safety until forced to comply, as they have been historically with almost all businesses.
Who is going to check that there are even working smoke detectors and a fire extinguisher? For that matter, who will even check that there is a cooker hood removing grease?
We don’t enforce these things for private homes because when you cook for yourself, your family, and people you know, there are social incentives in place to control safety. There’s no such incentive in place when you’re cooking for strangers.
And of course, this is a dramatically different story when you compare to ride-sharing. Private cars have the same safety features as the taxis already on the road, and drive on the same roads. Private kitchens do not have the same safety features as restaurant kitchens, and are not housed in the same buildings.
Private cars operate in public, with some expectation that the police will intervene if the car appears to be driven improperly, like speeding. Not perfectly, but there is enough oversight to provide incentives to drive safely. There is no such oversight for private kitchens.
Ride-sharing apps have a high degree of tracking: They monitor the car’s ___location and speed continuously. Location is shared with the passenger’s app. Will dining apps monitor the food being cooked? Do they know if the eggs are past their best-before date?
Dine-sharing is unlike ride-sharing or home-sharing in a number of substantial ways that are at relevant to zoning and the concept of what is and isn’t a fit establishment for cooking for strangers.
I've been writing code for 4 years now but have 17 years cooking experience, 11 in Michelin star restaurants and 6 as a private mega yacht chef. I have all professional small equipment in my home kitchen and the kitchen and dinning room are the same.[1] I am set up.
People tell me to do a food sharing experience for the public and I quickly say no. First, I don't want strangers in my house especially if they are drinking. It's illegal to sell alcohol. It's illegal to sell food without health inspection and license. I've never in my entire career have had someone come back to me suffering from food poisoning from something I've served, however, there is serious personal liability concerns over health risks and if someone gets into an accident after drinking at my party. A restaurant can prepare a stock that can be used over a couple days in several different dishes. At home, I have to prepare a stock for only one dish. It is very inefficient. I can't buy only the amount of parsley I need, I have to buy the whole bunch and it's like $3 now. The worst is the prohibitively expensive price of purchasing food at retail prices especially gourmet products. If I purchase a whole filet, lamb from Costco, or cod and tuna from the local fish monger, I'm still paying $25 - $30 per person for food. Economically scaling is a huge problem. I can make a risotto for 8 people with almost the same effort I can make the same dish for 35 people. Running a 8 seat restaurant in my house economically and legally doesn't work.
Wow, that looks really good. I have rockstar-level (probably more, TBH) respect and admiration for serious professional chefs. Maybe i should do the inverse career switch, but i'm not sure i'd know where to begin.
You must be popular for dinner parties with friends though. Something i've wondered about though, if and when you're invited to other peoples' dinner parties, is that weird? I have a friend who is a relatively good (not Michelin star or anything, but does it as her day job, and quite well IMHO) chef, which always makes me a bit jumpy / stage-frighty when cooking in front of her...
Certain food can't be made at scale or to order. Could you comment on how this type of food could be produced in a professional environment or is it just not saleable?
What do you do at Nucleics? My first job cooking in high school was doing micro preps for my dad, isolating DNA, PCR, agar gels, in David Baltimore's lab at Rockefeller University. My dad was in Walter Gilbert's lab at Harvard before that. Needless to say he was not amused I didn't go into the family business.
My limited experience is certain types of home cooking can't be replicated in restaurants - I am not sure why.
Nucleics is easier for me to answer. Nucleics has done a lot of things over the years (like me), but these days it sells software for improving Sanger DNA sequencing. A bit of of a niche market, but one that is surprisingly resilient.
I love science and in a perfect world I would still be a full time scientist, but I would never be disappointed if my children chose another field - science these days is just too cut-throat to encourage anyone to enter.
Just like there's a very broad spectrum between having a friend crash on your house for the evening to running a full time tenement house, one size fits all regulation is an imperfect tool for this job and social, rather than legal forces seem much more adept at negotiating between competing interests.
Underground restaurants have been operating for decades in countries all around the world with varying levels of formality and risk. For the most part, they're no more disruptive than that other friend on the block who likes to have dinner parties once a week. There may be a few who verge more into the full time restaurant side of the spectrum but they make up an exceedingly tiny percentage of underground dining. Most underground dining restaurants operate only one or two nights a week, in a single service, for 2 - 20 guests. This is a far cry from the multi-hundred covers a typical restaurant does and trying to apply the same standards of safety seems inappropriately draconian.
No matter how popular underground dining gets, it's still dwarfed by many magnitudes by the "having friends over for dinner" scenario which remains completely unregulated. It's hard to imagine any risk for underground dining even ever approaching that which already exists through our normal social dining rituals.
For the most part, report any underground restaurants that are truly disruptive but leave the rest alone and be happy that people are being entrepreneurial and doing something productive.
>Underground restaurants have been operating for decades
Having eaten at some of these underground restaurants, particularly in Mexico, Cuba and Argentina, I can comment that the experience was extremely positive. This is, I assume, due to regulation and corruption making it difficult for independent restauranteurs. However I would have much higher expectations of the same in say, California, where I might expect an independent restaurant to be extremely unique and have qualities you couldn't find in a regular setting.
Also, the margins on restaurants are miniscule. The margins on rental real estate are huge. It's easy to compete with hotels but hard to compete with restaurants.
And as the owner of a AirBNB-style "restaurant", you actually have to buy groceries and do a good deal of work. Without volume there's no good way for you to pipeline the food preparation process as most restaurants do. Every time you have "customers", you can't work that day. You probably make nowhere near a day's worth of salary preparing meals for a couple of people, so it can't be your main source of income.
As an AirBNB owner you can have a full-time job elsewhere AND some side income by renting out that extra bedroom, making it attractive to a lot of people.
I'm not sure what it's it like for some countries, but having done a cafe of my own, I found gross profit margins on restaurants to be huge. As far as making money goes, restaurants are a near foolproof way to convert time and money into more money.
Of course running a restaurant can be extremely tiring and frustrating. The money is good because not many people have the patience to work 60 hours a week for 10 years straight to make a million dollars. It's just better to do a startup or get a full time job making games or something.
It depends greatly on ___location. But keep in mind leverage and capital growth. In my area of London, you could service a mortgage to 90% loan to value with the rent. Which means that if you have enough assets to convince a bank to give you a 90% mortgage (50% is more common, but it's possible), then if you merely cover your costs with the rental income, you have 10x leverage on the capital growth. Lets say 2% growth per year, and you have a 20% return.
Obviously you are taking according risks, which is my the more typical LTV for but-to-rent mortgages is around 50%, which with 2% growth would give you only 4% return (but with a 50% LTV you'd likely have money left over after paying for the mortgage).
But in general, the capital growth combined with the potential for leverage is the reason rental is so competitive, and the reason why returns on the rental income itself is deceptively low.
It's a can of worms in the same way that Uber and Airbnb are. Airbnb bypasses Hotel regulations and permits. Uber bypasses taxi medallions, which used to be extremely expensive and have suddenly lost their value. Anyone who bought one a few years ago is pretty much screwed...
"if we want to allow businesses to operate in residential areas"
Residential area without businesses sounds crazy. I have three bakeries and around ten restaurants within 300m of my current apartment, not counting general stores.
I uses to live where there was a handful stores and nothing else, and moving was one of the best things I ever did.
> Residential area without businesses sounds crazy. I have three bakeries and around ten restaurants within 300m of my current apartment, not counting general stores.
I also have food businesses within 300m of where I live. There are mixed-use towers downtown. But that's not the same as businesses being inside your apartment building, one door over...
You're right though, mixed use neighbourhoods are great. I enjoy them too. I love high-density neighbourhoods in Europe and elsewhere.
But many suburbanites hate it. Many apartment dwellers would also be in for a big shock. It's something which isn't really part of our current city planning, and residents get mad when the government changes rules, never mind when neighbours suddenly decide to just flout the rules.
It doesn't have to be either-or. I spent most of my childhood in a small town in Norway. Most of it was suburban. But almost everyone was within 10 minutes walk from a small grocery store, and within 20 minutes walk from downtown which held a couple of small shopping centres, a couple of shopping streets, the train and bus stations.
Very few people lived next to any noisy businesses, but everyone lived near shops.
Perhaps because I work in healthcare and not in ... whatever the analogous field is, but I don't see the massive harm to the public that attends an unlicensed BnB (except for the flouting of our collective rules-making about where businesses are, and the impact on neighbors who had one sprung on them), whereas allowing people to just say "I used an app, so I don't have to bother to follow the rules that keep me from sickening and/or killing people on a regular basis" seems significantly worse.
> massive harm to the public that attends an unlicensed BnB
Reduces property value for everyone around them. Causes a nuissance. Can be a safety hazard, having a steady stream of non-residents coming and going in an apartment block.
Some of the regulation exists to protect the housing stock, so allowing just anyone to open an arbitrary number of unlicensed hotels can (and definitely does) drive up the cost of rent
fire codes is a big one - "I used an app so I don't have to make sure that there is a smoke detector, or regular inspections on the building wiring, or a second exit from the bedroom, or any signs showing where the exit is if you wake up in an unfamiliar place with smoke in your room, or even enough exits to handle all the people in the hotel trying to leave instantly".
> gets you banned here, no matter how you say them
That's a lie, but it's a clever trick to plant it in a smear comment, so we can't ban you without seeming to confirm it. Or rather, it would be clever if HN trolls hadn't been using it for years.
What does get you banned on HN is being a serial troll who creates new accounts merely to break the site rules.
Dang don't worry about this. I have been critical many times of various YC companies and as long as I have approached the criticism in a constructive manner I have not been voted down let alone banned.
Because one anecdote is data... Fact is, the restaurant industry is bigger than ever. Consumers now spend more money eating out than on groceries.
David Chang may not have figured out how to pay good salaries and make money, but many others have. And regardless, one failing restaurant (group) doesn't negate the fact that restaurant dollars are out there...
It's not just David Chang complaining about the slim profit margins that most restaurants operate with. Anyone who browses Eater on a regular basis will have come across multiple restaurant shutdowns almost on a daily basis. Does this mean that ALL restaurants struggle? Of course not, but you can't deny the fact that restaurants are extremely risky investments. This is why many well known chefs have started doing things like food trucks or pop up restaurants to test out new concepts rather than invest millions of dollars on signing a new building lease.
Part of the problem is that restaurateurs generally come up through the 'system'. A system where they're treated like shit by others, paid poorly, and told that various costs and inputs 'should be' X and Y. They accept shitty pay, never really accrue much capital, so when they do finally decide to start on their own, they are at the mercy of various dubious investors imposing exceptionally terrible terms.
I had the good luck of working with several chefs who wouldn't accept the 'status quo' of food cost, labour cost, ideal markup, etc... Including one who paid off all his debts (he was smart and didn't let investors take any equity) in about 2 years. We're talking capital investments well over a million - paid off in 2 years.
And then there's the whole 'Bistronomie' movement in France and Europe, propagated by guides like 'Le Fooding'. By contrast, North America is running restaurants like Europe did 15 years ago. Some are making great profits, but too many are controlled by their investors, leaving little profit for the workers.
> Of course not, but you can't deny the fact that restaurants are extremely risky investments.
Tech startups are as well. It's just that founders are generally more insulated from the risks. Restaurants likely have a higher 'success' rate than startups, considering how many live off venture capital for years.
I could rant for hours about what's wrong with restaurants (I did work in them for most of my working life). But that doesn't mean the 'industry' as a whole isn't booming.
For the right entrepreneurs, the money is there. They just need to operate more efficiently.
David Chang himself demonstrates what's wrong with his model. He's not charging enough. He fears that what he's creating isn't worth more than he's charging, but he can't make a great profit. He should either charge more, or change his product to something he can charge more for. He's right - no one will pay $27 for ramen. Many restaurants specialize in ramen. He can't compete with that. I haven't been to all his restaurants, but it does seem as though he's become more and more conventional as his enterprise has grown - his first several ventures were definitely off-the-wall sorts of places. Looking at menus at his new places - they're far larger, more complex, and more conventional in format, even if the dishes themselves are quite interesting.
IMO, the future is in smaller restaurants. Less workers. Limited menus. No investors sucking up profit. In many ways I see Japan as a glimpse into the future - entire neighbourhoods comprised of restaurants that are the size of a closet, with one artisan creating your food/drinks. It's not necessarily a 'scalable concept' like American investors like. But it's a way for workers to make a good living, and still create art and an 'experience'.
And I would venture a guess, if one were to look at statistics, that the average restaurant is getting smaller...
That Law Review article makes an interesting point:
"In other ways, however, underground dining seems quite similar to old-fashioned, antiregulatory libertarianism, with chefs playing the role of factory owners who would prefer to produce goods without having to worry about expensive and burdensome health and safety regulations.
Because people in general don't like to socialize with strangers and get into potentially awkward situations.
With Uber you just need to get from place A to B - a much easier sell, we already did that with strangers driving taxis anyway.
With dining, you want to relax, and be in an environment you like. And you need to trust the cooking and all that, and you don't want an afternoon out with your friends/family/spouse/romantic interest to get ruined from unfit hosts.
The same reason "rent-a-tool-from-your-neighbors" social services haven't caught on.
> Because people in general don't like to socialize with strangers and get into potentially awkward situations.
I'm not sure that's entirely true otherwise the likes of Meetup.com wouldn't have been a massive success.
Part of the reason I wouldn't use the "rent-a-tool" services is I know that sod's law dictates when I really, really need to use my drill, I'll have rented it out to someone else.
There's a lot of things in life that I would only use perhaps an hour in its lifespan but when you need to use them, you need them on hand and not elsewhere.
Plus, if your food is prepared improperly, who are you gonna complain to? Are you going to go to the chef's house and demand they cook you another meal?
I have a different answer: it may be just me, but I never even thought that such apps exist. I mean, I don't give a damn about airbnb, airwft or whatever, but the idea that I need to sleep somewhere when I travel is obvious to say the least, so I just google (ddg) something, find airbnb, somebody else does the same, finds airbnb, mentions it in his blogpost — and so it spreads.
But I don't go to google when I want to eat while being in my hometown. Because, well, it's my hometown — even if I'm not eating at home I already know some places myself, I can ask friends for advice, I can go for a walk and "find" something.
Actually, thinking of it, I might be one of these guys who would actually like socializing like that (which might not be rare, but certainly not as common as wanting to sleep under a roof, while staying in a country far away from home), but it never occurred to me that such practise exists.
The problem with this model is lack of both supply and demand. On the supply side the revenues are relatively low restaurants amortise costs across lots of customers which someone hosting in their house can't really do, so they either have to charge more (weakening the demand-side) or take the financial hit. There's not really a lot of money in it for the amount of work involved.
On the demand side there's no significant value-add for customers over restaurants.
That's not to say that there's no business model that might work in the space, but rather it will require more innovation.
The obvious model would be for people to operate their own takeaway businesses. Services like Deliveroo and UberEATs essentially mean that all you need to be a takeaway is a kitchen, everything else (marketing, payment process, delivery, etc.) you can outsource to your platform. Takeaways are much more scalable than "eat-in" allowing for more revenue and the demand-side doesn't care if you have a shop-front or not.
I think there's a market size problem here. I just don't want to eat with strangers. I have stayed with strangers in AirBnBs to save money, but far prefer whole-apartment pseudohotels. But the stay is not the benefit I'm receiving, the trip is what I'm seeking and the place to rest my head is a requirement. With the restaurant, the dinner is the thing I'm buying, and dining with strangers would reduce the value substantially (for me).
If they can capitalize on the economics while having tables of two or four, I'll be down for these pseudorestaurants.
So I actually tried the Japanese dinner they talk about with my wife and can attest that it's a truly unique experience. However I can also imagine it's hit and miss depending on who you end up eating with.
It's almost like being invited to a dinner party where you know very few people. If you are lucky the people you meet are great.
I eat out quite a and have eaten anywhere from Noma to French Laundry, Eleven Madison etc. and you can't really compare it. It's two very different experience.
or not just fast food, could be casual food. "Hey google, where can i eat a bowl of hot soup". Doesn't have to be $60 and you could end up talking about life with a grandma
I like taking my friends to hidden gem restaurants I find myself because if its good they'll be surprised. If an app was an charge any restaurant it points me to will be rammed and a sucky experience anyway.
This seems to be some kind of social experience. That's not comparable to Airbnb for me and personally something I would hate (I don't enjoy meeting new people but I do like food).
Then there's the fact that this is basically illegal in much (most?) of the US, Canada, and likely elsewhere. You can't prepare meals for the public without the food being prepared in an inspected and licensed establishment. Just like you can't run a hotel without the proper permits.
Also, as a side note, I was a cook/chef for 10 years (now an older university student), my last gig being a head chef job in a fine dining restaurant. I've toyed with the idea of starting a food-related business. I would personally love to be able to serve people in my home instead of spending $100,000+ (actually more like $500,000) on a small restaurant, or $50,000 on a food truck or other mobile establishment.
But allowing unlicensed establishments to operate opens up a huge can of worms - what happens to businesses who pay thousands of dollars in taxes, who buy liquor licenses often for upwards of $100,000, who are forced to pay exorbitant amounts of money to build a kitchen which follows the various health codes? Will they be compensated? Will the meal-sharers be forced to upgrade their kitchens? Will they be inspected?
We have to decide, as a society, if we want to allow businesses to operate in residential areas. We can't simply encourage people to break the law because it makes some guy with an app money...
Edit - just found a good article about the legality of food sharing/underground dining: https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/page/regulating-underground-s...