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Family-style dining is inherently social. New Y Combinator-backed startup Grubwithus launches today in San Francisco and applies this intimacy to a dinner with strangers model in the hopes that diners will build new relationships over a social meal.
Grubwithus is the product of longtime buddies from Berkeley, Eddy Lu and Daishin Sugano who, earlier in life, left corporate jobs to start a cream puff business. When the franchise grew in popularity, the entrepreneurial pair expanded the chain to Chicago. But the dislocation uprooted Lu and Sugano from their friends, before they happened upon the clever idea that became Grubwithus.
Grubwithus, now live in Chicago and San Francisco, offers price-fixed, family-style meals at vetted restaurants with the intention of bringing together singles and couples who want to meet new people in their neighborhoods. Users can reserve a seat at a limited-capacity table and pay for everything — meal, tax and gratuity — in advance. Of course, potential diners can also review the menu and the other people attending before booking.
The founders work with interested restaurants to orchestrate the offering and plan the meal. Sugano describes the model as the opposite of Groupon’s, which he feels brings in the type of consumer who is only interested in a cheap meal. “Restaurants,” he says, “love us because we bring in new customers and not Groupon cheapskates.”
Users reserve meals to meet new people, and restaurants like it because the diners will spread the word, Sugano says.
Lu and Sugano launched an early stage version of Grubwithus in August 2010 and found immediate interest from the Chicago community before being admitted to Y Combinator’s startup incubator program. Today, the startup touts a 3,000-person member base that is growing steadily.
The dinner with strangers concept is not entirely original — a scaled down, more simplistic version of the idea has been a popular mechanism for connecting people in professional circles and on college campuses. Grubwithus takes the age-old idea of bonding over food and makes it accessible to anyone hoping to meet new people.
The idea has grown over time to allow for do-it-yourself Grubwithus group meals. The process is fairly manual to start, but soon users will be able to use the site to organize their own dinners; Grubwithus does the dirty work of booking a location, setting the menu and managing the finances.
This side dish offering caters to anyone looking to organize a birthday dinner, bachelor party or meet-and-greet, and simplifies the group dinner setup process, while also eliminating the awkwardness of splitting the check.
Grubwithus is a promising Y Combinator startup with an ingenious, but early stage product. “We have our heads down, our blinders on, and are just pounding away at the product,” says Sugano.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Frederic Poirot
Posted via email from Stuff important and amusing to Rob OBrien
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