Willing to cook for strangers, guests harder to find

Social dining has not caught on in the same way as an Airbnb or Uber

In a penthouse apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown on a recent Monday night, Lisa Larsson chopped shiitake mushrooms and looked rather relaxed for someone about to host a 14-person dinner.
 
She had arranged the party through the app AirDine, which lets users pay to eat at strangers’ houses, rating the experience afterwards. The app started in Sweden last year, and expanded to the United States and elsewhere in March. Larsson, 26, a painter originally from Sweden, was hosting the first party in the United States.
 
The guests — half friends and half strangers — arrived. Mostly millennials, they displayed a dinner-party-appropriate gravitas: pocket squares, bottles of wine for Larsson. There was only a whiff of cynicism when Noor Shams, who works in microfinance, said the doorman downstairs did not recognise Larsson’s name and “for a second, I was, like, this is a scam!”

 

It was not a scam — but whether AirDine and a wave of similar apps can get consumers to embrace them is a question. While other companies have conquered car rides (Uber), bedroom rentals (Airbnb) and errand running (TaskRabbit), AirDine and services like EatWith and Feastly are trying to master shared dining. Yet social dining has not so far caught on in the same way, and a few of the apps have already shut down.
 
The challenge is not finding hosts willing to invite strangers over. It’s finding guests willing to show up.
 
“My thought was, it must be hard to find these amazing chefs and hosts, and convince them to do it out of their home. That actually hasn’t been the obstacle,” said Susan Kim, the chief executive of EatWith, whose site started in 2012. “When people try it, they love it, but how do we get people to try this new way of experiencing a city or a new way of eating out? It’s been an intellectual conundrum.”

 
The social-dining companies all come at the premise from different angles. EatWith focuses on travellers, with meals in 200 cities. Feastly signs up professional chefs as hosts. VoulezVouzDîner lets travellers and other diners request hosted meals on specific days. AirDine asks hosts to arrange fixed dinners and, ideally, fill the table with strangers. And BonAppetour and VizEat offer food experiences, like market tours, along with meals.
 
But all try to make money in the same way: The companies take a percentage of what hosts charge guests to attend, usually 15 to 20 per cent. Hosts can set whatever price they like for guests; Larsson charged $10 a head, while lots of EatWith and Feastly meals run $80 and up. The companies generally do not charge guests or hosts to join the platforms.

 
Christienne Dobson, a designer in Harlem and an EatWith host, said she saw cooking as a hobby rather than an income stream. “Basically, I’m not spending money to host people — it pays for itself, which is really nice, so I can source better ingredients, source different types of food,” she said.

 © 2017 New York Times News Service