Is it last orders for restaurants?

Is this the end of Bangladeshi and other traditional restaurants in he UK. This website offers eating out at the home of a chef.

---

This article titled “Is it last orders for restaurants?” was written by Killian Fox, for The Observer on Sunday 26th June 2016 06.00 UTC

Last weekend, with a certain amount of trepidation, I made a booking with a website called EatAbout, whose tagline invites you to “enjoy private meals in the home of a chef”. Conceived last October by two young Swedes living in London, the website launched in January with the intention of “democratising eating out” and making “good food accessible to everyone” by cutting out many of the costs associated with running a restaurant. Despite a deep and abiding love of the traditional restaurant-going experience, I was curious enough about the concept to give it a try.

First, I scan a map of London for hosts – EatAbout currently has 30 chefs in its network, all within the M25 – and settle upon Carine O, whose food incorporates influences from France and her native Cameroon. Then, out of five options, I pick a three-course menu called “Fish BBQ My Way”, priced at £77 for two. Once I’ve chosen a time and submitted my card details, Carine gets in touch to ask whether we’d prefer mackerel or sea bass and then offers some friendly advice on wine (EatAbout invites guests to bring their own). The next day, bottle in hand and with the meal already paid for, we arrive at Carine’s home in south London ready for some barbecued fish.

This idea of turning up at a complete stranger’s house and paying them to cook you dinner isn’t a complete novelty. Supper clubs have been around since the 1930s and the concept has blossomed in the UK over the past decade, aided by the rise of social media. At their best, supper clubs create an intimate and casual alternative to restaurants while avoiding many of the common pitfalls associated with eating out, such as queuing, table-turning and bills spiralling out of control under the influence of (heavily marked-up) alcohol.

As supper clubs became a global phenomenon, entrepreneurs in the tech world began to exploit their popularity by creating platforms that connected hosts with customers, aiming to do for dining what Airbnb has done for accommodation. While some, such as GrubWithUs and Kitchen.ly, have come and gone, others have taken off in a big way – EatWith, founded in Tel Aviv in 2010, now advertises hosts in 150 cities worldwide.

A newcomer on the scene, EatAbout offers a small but significant twist on the formula. “If you book with other websites you end up eating with strangers,” says the site’s 25-year-old co-founder Felix Bråberg. “On EatAbout, we only do private events. If you think about the last time you went to a restaurant, you probably didn’t go with complete strangers, you probably had some sort of connection with the people you were sitting with. That’s how we’re different from supper clubs and that’s where we think the future lies.”

To encourage diners to book in larger groups, Bråberg and his co-founder, Philip Källberg, have introduced a variable pricing scheme: “the more people you are, the cheaper the price per person”. This makes financial sense for the host, who will always prefer a full house, and for EatAbout, which takes a 10% cut of the total payment.

It also alleviates the potential awkwardness of being served by a stranger in their own home. Luckily for us (my wife and I are paying an extra £2.75 each for the privilege of dining à deux, compared with a group of six), Carine immediately puts us at our ease. Upbeat West African music is playing on the stereo as we enter and the enticing aroma of barbecue wafts in from the back garden. Our host pours us glasses of our own wine (EatAbout doesn’t charge corkage) and for the first time since making the booking, I feel my scepticism about this whole set-up starting to seep away.

Given their capacity for taking experiences like this and scaling them up, it’s no surprise that websites such as EatAbout have been attracting wary glances from the restaurant business. In recent years, tech companies have been merrily disrupting the worlds of music, publishing, retail, hotels and taxis, to name just a few, by creating cheaper, more efficient and easier-to-use alternatives that can have a devastating effect on the existing industry. So far, restaurants have escaped relatively unscathed; in fact, turnover in the UK sector went up by 39% between 2010 and 2015, proving that restaurants are robust in the face of recession as well as digital encroachment. But this has only made tech entrepreneurs more eager to get in on the action.

It may be too early to compare social dining platforms such as EatAbout with genuine disrupters such as Airbnb and Uber. “Unlike hotels, which have a captive market, in that everyone visiting a city needs a place to stay, restaurants exist for the neighbourhood they inhabit, for their people,” says the chef Jackson Boxer, who runs the restaurant at Brunswick House in Vauxhall, south London. “I think there are lots of fabulous things about the supper club model, but these sites are filling a niche. I don’t think they’re a threat.”

Not everyone in the industry shares his confidence. In Paris, the restaurateurs’ union Synhorcat has appealed to the French government to crack down on “underground restaurants”, arguing that bistros and brasseries operating on very thin margins risk being put out of business. “In the space of three years Airbnb has tripled its presence in Paris, to the point that there are now 50,000 flats advertised on its website,” Synhorcat’s president, Didier Chenet, told the BBC last October. “If the government doesn’t do something to stop the underground restaurants, it will be the same disaster.”

Competition is coming from other angles, too, enabled by smartphone ubiquity and the rise of apps. With its promise to bring you restaurant-quality food at home, Deliveroo is growing 25% month on month and is now available in more than 70 countries worldwide. Along with other tech-powered delivery companies such as Supper and UberEATS, which recently launched in the US and in London, Deliveroo is encouraging people to buy in rather than venture out, though it still relies on restaurants to prepare the food in the first place.

One smart innovation is the model being developed by another London-based site called DishNextDoor. Instead of sourcing meals from restaurants or takeaways, it links you up with talented cooks in your neighbourhood who do everything from their home kitchens. You browse the website for tempting dishes nearby, arrange a collection time (it could be as little as 20 minutes after the order is placed) and pick up a freshly cooked meal from your neighbour’s door.

The site was created by three colleagues at a consultancy in Soho. “We were working long days and never had time to cook, so we were resorting to eating bad food,” says co-founder Bob Conwell. “The penny-drop moment was seeing Joel [Ng, another co-founder] with a delicious Malaysian curry that his mum, Nancy, had made. We figured, there are probably a lot of Nancys out there who are great in the kitchen and have a little extra time on their hands.”

A fourth founder joined from Net-A-Porter in May 2015, they launched the site in January and are now expanding outwards from north-east London. To be accepted on to the platform, prospective cooks need to receive food hygiene training, have their kitchen approved by the council and, finally, convince Conwell and his team that their cooking is up to scratch.

Out of nearly 100 cooks on Dish Next Door’s network, I choose Dorothee, who lives a mile away and cooks me a very tasty tarragon chicken with garlic rice and salad for £8 a portion. She used to run a well-regarded bistro called Bouchon Fourchette in Hackney but sold it last October after becoming pregnant. Now, with a baby to care for, she enjoys the flexibility of DishNextDoor. “You can cook whatever and whenever you want,” she says when we meet on her doorstep. “And it’s nice to know you’re cooking for your neighbours.”

Dorothee spends around four evenings a week making meals for DishNextDoor, which takes a 20% cut. “On average, I’ll cook four portions and sell three out of four. If I don’t sell out, we eat the leftovers tomorrow.” It’s unlikely to make her a fortune, but one of the main rewards for Dorothee is job satisfaction. “I just really love cooking for people,” she says.

One challenge for DishNextDoor, and any ambitious food delivery company, is wowing diners within the constraints imposed by transportation. The kind of intricate, sculptural dishes you find in Michelin-starred restaurants would make no sense if they have to be delivered, nor would a perfectly cooked steak, however sophisticated the packaging. It’s simple, hearty dishes such as Dorothee’s chicken and rice or the delicious Keralan pork curry I order from a DishNextDoor cook named Justin a few days later that work best when shuttled from one place to another in a white cardboard box.

These limitations don’t apply at restaurants or private dining clubs. At Carine’s house, we begin with barbecued flat peaches served with charred cabbage, slivers of radish and a wild blackberry vinaigrette – a brilliant dish. The main course comes on rectangles of slate almost as wide as the table: whole mackerel with deep-fried plantain, grilled corn, homemade hot sauce and fingers of watermelon to cool the chilli burn. For pudding, we get mango and lime sorbet with a coconut ball and a bracing shot of ginger juice on the side.

Carine has no experience in professional kitchens – she picked up her skills from family members and joined EatAbout after being made redundant from her IT job last year – and she has very little desire to open a restaurant. “I don’t really fancy it,” she says. “In restaurants, it’s all about logistics. There’s not much space for creativity and after six months you get bored.” Instead, she is developing an online platform called Inspiring Chefs, which will offer cookery lessons as well as meals and she has plans to market her fiery hot sauce. Meanwhile, she’s happy catering to groups at home whenever she feels like it – she hosts via EatAbout “at least twice a month”.

Bråberg agrees with Carine’s assessment of working in restaurants and estimates than nearly half of the hosts on his network are trained chefs who no longer work in professional kitchens. He is also critical of the customer experience. “When you go to a restaurant, a large percentage of what you pay goes towards rent, waiting staff, facilities and so forth. With EatAbout, you’re going straight to the chef and getting a really good meal for a cheaper price. Also you pay in advance and it’s BYOB, so you don’t get any nasty surprises with the bill.”

Whereas Bob Conwell of DishNextDoor believes that restaurants can happily co-exist with this new breed of online dining services, Bråberg is adamant that his company represents serious competition. “We want to be an alternative to a restaurant,” he says. “We want to take a piece of their market share. So consumers will think, ‘Either I’ll go to a restaurant or I’ll book an EatAbout experience’ – it’s the same thought process as booking Airbnb.”

Over at Brunswick House, Boxer acknowledges that online dining services have some advantages over restaurants, including greater creative freedom and lower costs, but he strongly contests the idea that they pose a direct threat. “Restaurants have a very different role to fulfil: they’re open to everyone, they create a shared space. The best ones have that wonderful quality of being able to create a sort of personal intimacy within a crowd, so that even in a bustling room of people you still feel very special and alone with the people at your table. I think great restaurants achieve that in a way that can’t be replicated within people’s homes.”

Despite initial misgivings about booking on EatAbout, I leave Carine’s house feeling enriched by the experience. It’s not always fun to have a chef hovering nearby while you sample their creations, but in this case we’re happy to see how unfamiliar dishes are prepared and hear the story behind Carine’s cooking.

I certainly wouldn’t rule out using EatAbout again. If I wanted to celebrate a birthday, for example, I’d much rather be hosted by someone like Carine, with the bill already settled, than book a private dining room. But will I eat out in restaurants any less as a result? I doubt it. Despite their many downsides, I’m too addicted to the buzz of restaurants and sometimes I’d much rather sit among strangers in a public space than know everybody in the room.

Whether online dining services will have an impact upon the restaurant sector as they evolve is a different question, however. Not everyone shares my sentimental attachment to restaurant going and as any hotelier or taxi driver will readily tell you it never pays to underestimate the disruptive power of the internet.

The new dining apps

EatAbout
Pitch ‘Eat beyond the restaurant – enjoy private meals in the home of a chef’
How it works Search by location, date and number of guests, then choose a meal that whets your appetite. Only available in central London at the moment
Typical dish Felix B’s London lobster and seafood feast, £36.30/guest

DishNextDoor
Pitch ‘Home-cooked food delivered to your door’
How it works Search the site for local cooks offering dishes for delivery. Mainly north and east London at present
Typical dish Ali’s authentic Bangladeshi beef curry, £8/portion

EatWith
Pitch ‘The future of dining is here’
How it works Hosts all over the globe offer communal dining
Typical dish Carlos and Vanina’s Argentine BBQ, malbec and empanadas, £47/guest, Buenos Aires

ChefXchange
The pitch ‘Your home. Our chefs. Your culinary experience’
How it works Browse the chefs, discuss your menu and enjoy professional cooking without leaving your home. They even promise to do the dishes afterwards
Typical dish Chef Andrea’s rosemary-smoked langoustine, crispy guanciale (part of a four-course menu), £120/guest, London

VizEat
The pitch ‘The world invites you to dinner’

How it works Choose from cooks in the world’s major cities who’ll entertain you in their homes
Typical dish Maria, Laura and Barbara’s rigatoni gricia pasta with cheek bacon, sheep milk pecorino cheese and pepper (part of a five-course meal) €45/guest, Rome

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.