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Paris chefs catering for diners in their own homes

• anon4 11y ago
  It finally happened https://farm5.static.flickr.com/4005/4381726392_ecf7e0b162.jpg https://farm5.static.flickr.com/4005/4381726392_ecf7e0b162.j...
  • buserror 11y ago
    Sounds like a good idea to me. A lot less dangerous than lending your home away when you go on holidays! I do a lot of cooking myself (expat french, it's survival requirement ;-)) so I'm actually quite interested by that setup, especially to meet people who also cook or just appreciate good food...
• Natanael_L 11y ago
  > "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 tells me. He says small and medium-sized hotels have been hit hard and over the summer they had to drop their prices. "If the government doesn't do something to stop the underground restaurants, it will be the same disaster." What a disaster. /s
• DiabloD3 11y ago
  Wow, they'd hate most of small town America: most people cook, and either eat what they themselves cook, or are invited over for dinner and bring shit they cooked. And I don't mean "reheated frozen prepared food", a lot of people actually do cook when other people are eating it. At least, around here they do.
  • SeanBoocock 11y ago
    Cooking for oneself, or inviting over friends for a shared meal isn't what is at issue here. The conflict is over a new commercial enterprise - people preparing and serving meals for profit in their homes, mediated by apps/web services - in an industry with existing regulations. The situation has many of the same tensions as Airbnb vs the traditional hotel industry.
    • dexterdog 11y ago
      And like ABnB/Uber the industry is ripe for disruption because of the over-regulation that exists in many places. When people are motivated to make money and realize that the best way to do that is not to cut corners, but to have satisfied customers there is no need for regulation by a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy that usually operates primarily in its own interest.
      • ghaff 11y ago
        Really? Sure, there's been IMO unwarranted hostility toward food trucks in some cities. But I wouldn't generally put health/safety inspections and other regulations concerning restaurants in the over-regulation "by a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy bucket." I'm sure that if one is a restaurant owner, there are regulatory things one finds annoying but, given the many insider stories one can see or read, it doesn't strike me as an industry that cries out for laxer standards.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  • draw_down 11y ago
    People sometimes give their friend a ride in their car, that doesn't really have anything to do with Uber.
• byron_fast 11y ago
  Disintermediate your own employer! Marry a gardener, and cut out your suppliers as well. Pretty sure restaurants will survive this, though their service may have to improve.
• krishan711 11y ago
  I always try and imagine how big things became that way. We watch football in huge stadiums, but I like to think back to a time where people would just get together on Sunday and watch a match - and as they got more and more interesting, people decided that we need more space and built bigger and bigger stadiums. It feels like this with all this 'sharing economy' stuff. Restaurants probably started off (many, many) years ago just being people inviting others over to eat - over time the best hosts started to charge more and more, and bought bigger and bigger places to host more and more people. Soon there were enough people doing this that it needed to be regulated. It's like we're going in a circle.
  • xlm1717 11y ago
    This being the internet, you don't have to wonder about such things. Here's a page with a lot of history on several different food topics: http://www.foodtimeline.org/restaurants.html http://www.foodtimeline.org/restaurants.html One interesting tidbit is that oldest dining menu comes from ancient Sumeria. They list a proper meal for the gods. Since the king was considered a living god, this could be considered a menu for the king. (So restaurants likely started off as a formalized meal "ritual" for the king.) It also says that, broadly, street food can be traced back to military mess units. It's likely that during peacetime, the people who prepared food for military units went on to prepare food for the general public. I also like to imagine that we have football stadiums now because of the Roman use of the Coliseum for watching live sports thousands of years ago, and the Coliseum was just the largest amphitheater, a structure which the Romans borrowed from the ancient Greeks. This would significantly predate the development of football.
    • krishan711 11y ago
      Ha, I should have thought to dive a bit deeper. I think the thought still makes sense though - I was just using football as an example, it can be extended to why did the Greeks build amphitheaters in the first place. It's not like one day they decided 'huge audiences must be great' - it must have started with smaller audiences and iterated into the big structures designed to hold larger audiences. My point was we seem to be starting this iteration from scratch for a quite a few things.
• ghaff 11y ago
  My sense is that families having cooks--at least in some locations and for some levels of income--used to be more common than it is today. I suspect that some combination of changes in lifestyle and availability of prepared food (e.g. takeout, frozen food) in various forms has made it less common. The basic idea written about here isn't unreasonable. However, I'd posit that most of the people who want to eat well but don't want to spend the time cooking would also have trouble with the planning for someone to come over to their house at a specific time.
  • pjc50 11y ago
    for some levels of income Absolutely. In the past times of high inequality it was routine for the comparatively small number of "middle class" people to have at least one member of domestic staff, often a woman who would cook and clean. This absolutely relies on high income inequality and low tax overhead of having an employee, who themselves would not have a pension or social security.
    • ghaff 11y ago
      Income ranges definitely play a big role. That's at least part of why full-time "help" is more common in some areas of the world than others. This is admittedly a bit different as it's more like bringing the restaurant experience to the home and doesn't seem to really be intended as a day-to-day thing but rather an alternative to going to a restaurant for a nice meal out. It's really not that far removed from a caterer although caterers tend to focus on larger parties. (Though, when I worked part-time for a caterer back in school, we did handle more modestly-sized groups like Thanksgiving dinners in a house.)
• jon-wood 11y ago
  In London this has been a pretty common thing in the form of supper clubs for at least the last five years, and I don't think anyone is worrying about the restaurant industry collapsing just yet. They tend to be small scale, infrequently run, events in someone's home, with a large one seating maybe ten or twelve people.
  • ghaff 11y ago
    Pop-up restaurants seems to be the more common term in the US but they range from this sort of thing to relatively small-scale but even regulated (a la food trucks) temporary restaurants.
    • tedmiston 11y ago
      I see pop-up shops, mostly retail, regularly, but never restaurants. The closest I've seen are food trucks, at least in Ohio.
      • jon-wood 11y ago
        Be thankful, you can barely move in London for pop-up restaurants with "wacky" concepts and overpriced food. Some of them are pretty good, but a lot seem to be pop ups because they wouldn't survive building up a reputation.
        • tedmiston 11y ago
          Interesting. We also are starting to have something here sort of like a popup where a guest chef will host in a place like a coffee shop and cook a fancy full course dinner say one night per month. Is that common over there?
          • jon-wood 11y ago
            I've not seen a lot of that, much more common is someone renting an empty shop front for a few weeks, doing a full service every night during that time, and then shutting it down again.
• Mikeb85 11y ago
  As interesting as this is, its more just a way to have a 'local' eating experience - see how Parisians cook at home. It doesn't really supplant the restaurant experience, its just a different eating experience...
• rubidium 11y ago
  So I want to start being a home chef once every week or two with my wife. She's an amazing cook. I'd enjoy hosting, setting up, serving, etc... Getting to make a great meal would be fun. And getting paid a little bit would make the hobby even better. How do I get started? Which one of ya'll is starting this app?
  • hellbanner 11y ago
    Just start with your friends & work connections!
    • rubidium 11y ago
      We do that already. But then you're the host and expected to eat/converse at length. You also don't get paid (I least I'm not going to charge my friends).
  • untothebreach 11y ago
    According to the article, this app is good: https://www.vizeat.com/ https://www.vizeat.com/
• gabemart 11y ago
  With AirBnB, you can pretty quickly assess the quality and safety of the apartment or room by reading about the local area, looking at photos of the apartment, checking for e.g. smoke detectors upon arrival, etc. If there's a problem with the apartment that the photos don't show, like mould or a terrible smell, you can pick up on this very quickly after arrival and leave to find somewhere else. With Uber, I can check the car has seat belts before we depart, see if there are any big dents in the chassis, etc. If the driver is driving erraticly, I can ask them to stop the car and I can leave. With a sharing-economy-restaurant, there's no way for me to assess how safe the food is to eat. Is this person's fridge at a safe temperature? Do they use a separate cutting board for raw meat or fish? Do they regularly wash their hands? Did they try making their own chilli oil and accidentally culture botulism? Did they use some mouldy peanuts full of aflatoxin? It's much harder to pick up on these things. The first you might know about them is two or three days later when you get sick. These are risks with any restaurant, but with a regular restaurant they are inspected, licensed etc. I eat food prepared by my friends, but I trust my friends implicitly, and my friends aren't financially motivated so aren't incentivised to cut corners. Call me a food safety nit, but the idea of eating food prepared by unlicensed strangers does not seem appealing.
  • ghaff 11y ago
    Like many things related to the (increasingly ill-named) sharing economy, I worry more about how unregulated things work at scale. Someone coming over to my house to cook dinner for me and some friends? I'm not so concerned whether they have taken courses in food safety and have a letter grade from the local health inspector. If they're running a 5 night a week 30 seat unlicensed restaurant? Then I worry more about fridge temperatures and cleanliness.
  • imaginenore 11y ago
    You don't know any of these things about restaurants either. There are tons of dirty restaurants with rats and roaches. Most restaurants have a dozen health violations: http://www.city-data.com/ny-restaurants/index1.html http://www.city-data.com/ny-restaurants/index1.html
  • beardicus 11y ago
• rjbwork 11y ago
  My roommate is a professional chef that does this for a living. He seems to enjoy the flexibility and creativity the lifestyle affords him, and often gets to bring home leftovers for us. Maybe restaurants should get into this on the side if they think it's such a problem.
• guiomie 11y ago
  Interesting phenomena we are seeing here. Am I the only one who found this sentence awkward? "According to Jaime, the Mexican, there are growing numbers of "secret restaurants" in Paris"
• altoz 11y ago
  This is absolutely fascinating. Is there a website like airbnb.com where you can read reviews and book something like this?
  • exhilaration 11y ago
    From the article: https://www.vizeat.com https://www.vizeat.com
• renox 11y ago
  Journalistic exaggeration much? I live in Paris's suburb and that's the first time I hear about 'secret restaurants'. I don't deny that they exist, just that they are probably in very small number. Are there 'secret cafés'? If so I'm interested: many cafés in Paris treat their customers poorly.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• Jedd 11y ago
  John Ralston Saul, writing in The Doubter's Companion: > Restaurants, until recently, were places of refuge for people > excluded from the mainstream or seeking to escape it—poor students, > aging unmarried men not rich enough to have themselves fed at home, > richer men seeking sex not wives, and the proverbial artists leading > their irresponsible lives. Over the last half-century, restaurants > have risen in importance to fill the void left by the decline of the > old public celebrations. They now provide the leading forums of public > participation. He's right - restaurants are a relatively modern convenience / provide an arguably regrettable function, and we'd do well to not assume that their implementation is currently ideal, or demands preservation. Whether this approach is inherently better or worse _in totality_ is a somewhat irrelevant question.
• bionsuba 11y ago
  > He says small and medium-sized hotels have been hit hard and over the summer they had to drop their prices The horror. Creative destruction is a bitch when you're the one getting destroyed.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• PaulHoule 11y ago
  We used to have one of these in our town that was run by the Situationist International and would move from house to house.
• beat 11y ago
  Anthony Bourdain has observed that the only way to cook like a professional is to be a professional cook. If you aren't doing it full-time, you just won't have the same chops. (By comparison, imagine if you only wrote software a few hours a couple of times a week. Think you'd be as good?) But really, this turns on a grey line. If someone is doing a weekly or semi-monthly meal in their own home, for a handful of people, is that a "restaurant"? If I invite a friend for dinner and they bring a date, am I now a "restaurant"? On the other hand, if someone is doing this three nights a week and turning a real profit, that's kinda different. A regulatory line should be set. The cleanliness issues, I think, are totally overrated. No one is going to be serving something they haven't tried making before. If they poisoned themselves, they'll learn. Cleanliness is harder cooking at scale.
  • collyw 11y ago
    A good proportion of the food we eat is served hot, which will kill of most bacteria.
• manuelflara 11y ago
  I recently spent a few months in Buenos Aires, and these sort of "illegal" restaurants (in the chef's home) are common and have been for years. In fact, they're amazing. Of course, it doesn't happen EU and the US for regulatory reasons, which in a way understand. But it's so sad that great chefs that could be making a living and providing some great food (like in BA), can't because it requires a ridiculous amount of money and licenses to open and operate a legal restaurant. I understand why those laws are in place, but it's still sad. After all, most people cook at home and people rarely get sick or die from not following thorough best practices. Mind you, these illegal restaurants are usually quite small, so they don't really cook at an "industrial scale" like a lot of restaurants do. At one I went we were just 8 random people sitting around a table, and the meal (and company) was amazing. More info: http://munchies.vice.com/articles/argentinas-best-restaurants-are-illegal http://munchies.vice.com/articles/argentinas-best-restaurant...
  • griffinkelly 11y ago
    I was down there recently and did the exact same thing with a friend of mine. Probably one of the best meals I ate at while there, and the vibe was awesome. We were the only group there, so service was great as well. There's a Brazilian startup that connects these underground restaurants, that you would usually need to know by word of mouth, with interested parties: cookapp. Its pretty popular in BA and I think trying to make it to NYC, but has regulatory hurdles to get around.
  • collyw 11y ago
    I went to a cooking workshop in Barcelona a couple of years back and the chef offered exactly that service. I never used it though and I would be surprised if he is putting people out of buisness as eating out is a large part of the culture here. Its nice to get out of the appartment and into the resturants and bars. Its part of what makes this city great to me.