Why This Lehigh Valley Start-Up Is Asking You To Rate Restaurants Privately
“Course™️doesn’t make recommendations - or publicly grade people’s businesses with a one-size-fits-all rating. Instead, Course™️continually calculates your personal compatibility with restaurants based on the information you provide through fun personal taste quizzes and your private ratings of the restaurants you’ve visited.”
Josh Sapienza’s Pennsylvania based start-up (Hawser LLC.) just launched Course: Restaurant Guide this past month. The app matches people with restaurants they’ll love and it’s been built, in part, to help clean up some of what’s left in the wake of several multi-billion dollar platforms, publishers and websites that have long been promoting the brutal public critiques of restaurants online and the now out-of-control critic culture that glorifies issuing small businesses “one-size-fits-all” grades or scores that often have devastating impacts on local businesses and the livelihoods of the men and women they employ.
Few would argue the fact that the industry revealing media that offers a glimpse behind the swinging doors (like the book “Kitchen Confidential”, films like “Chef”, “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”, Burnt” & “Waiting” or shows like “Iron Chef”, “Chopped” and “Top Chef”) have all served to elevate Chefs, and the culinary arts in general, to unprecedented heights of celebrity.
In fact, some might say that the cooking competition shows have given complex beautiful dishes and the culinary artists who create them (under serious pressure and time constraints) so much exposure that they’ve raised the mainstream expectation of what “dining” is (or could be) all across the country.
Add to that, the fact that the men and women who serve as judges to rate these masterful culinary athletes, their techniques, execution and presentation…have also enjoyed a tremendous amount of notoriety - and you’ve now got quite a large audience who has “learned” not only what “great” food is but also what it also means to be great or “Top” Chef.
But not everyone likes high-end complicated food. Taste is personal and the flip side of sensationalizing or glorifying food that doubles as high art is an unfortunate (and very likely unintentional) diminished value of simple less-nuanced cuisine and the line cooks who pump it out daily.
In fact, while we were conducting market research for our new app: Course, I often askeds people how frequently they dined out and how they’d decide on which restaurants to visit.
Occasionally, I’d encounter some who’d claim that they “…don’t really dine out.”.
Being armed with a ton of data from multiple reliable sources and decades of first hand experience - I couldn’t believe what I was hearing so, I’d press a bit… and say something along the lines of: “So, you’re telling me you don’t go out to eat…like ever?”.
And they’d say: “No. Not really.”.
I’d continue: “So you make every meal at home? Breakfast, lunch and dinner? 7 days a week - and never go out or order-in from a restaurant?
Every single one of them eventually admitted two things: #1. That they don’t cook every meal. and #2. That they actually go out for food and average of 2.5 xs/week “…but not to a restaurant.”.
When I’d ask them to clarify what they meant by: “…not to a restaurant.” they’d respond with something like:
“We just go to diners or Carabas or Applebee’s or Perkins or grab take out from the corner bar… or order Domino’s.”
And I’d be like: “Oh, OK… You know those are all restaurants right?”
And they’d say: “Well, I mean we don’t go out to like real restaurants…” or “well…yeah they’re restaurants but they’re not fancy.”.
I was shocked to learn just how marginalized people were made to feel if they weren’t dining at an expensive, fancy restaurant helmed by a chef they had seen on TV or that had been awarded a certain number of stars by a national publication or even local food critic. And I thought…how sad is that!?
It was then that I suddenly began to to have a profound appreciation for what the Food Network’s Bob Tuschman and stars like Guy Fieri were doing to counter-balance this negative impact with shows like “Diners Drive-Ins and Dives”.
I mean, they not only validate the appreciation of simple comfort foods; they, literally, give these not-so-simple “greasy spoon” bars & restaurants an amount of exposure that most of them couldn’t afford in 10 lifetimes - and I thought: Man, if we could have even a fraction of that kind of impact…where people felt more included and their personal taste was more celebrated instead of trivialized …we’d be doing something really good.
https://www.distractify.com/p/do-the-restaurants-pay-to-be-on-diners-drive-ins-and-dives
Although trying new restaurants is one of my favorite pastimes - for some people, choosing a restaurant can be intimidating …especially when you’re on unfamiliar with an area or just don’t go out all that often. Pleasant dining experience can be a lot like a bad date - huge waste of time that sometimes results in people giving up or sticking with what’s familiar.
So it became very clear, very quickly, that we could help increase sales for our neighborhoods’ struggling restaurants simply by increasing the chances that people are going to love the next restaurant they try… and having even the smallest hand in helping independent restaurants now - while they need more help than ever - was worth going all in.
At the end of the day, restaurants are a public celebration of diversity. But not just diversity of taste… restaurants celebrate a diversity of: cultures, geography, heritage, personal experiences and artistic expressions.
Restaurants make up the very fabric of our diverse and colorful communities so, instead of focusing on the private aspect of our ratings and review platform, we settled on a couple of tag-lines that highlight our focus on deep personalization:
Over the years, many of us have adopted the personas of entitled and outspoken critics. Online public reviews have become a necessary (and often evil) part of managing a restaurant right now. If an operator can’t afford to hire someone to address each complaint or bad review in their own voice, they have to put the time in themselves. And if you’ve every worked in a restaurant or bar…or know someone who has -then you know that time is not something they have a lot of - especially now.
The thing that really sets Course Restaurant Guide apart from every other rating or recommendation app out there is the fact that Course doesn’t make recommendations - or publicly grade people’s businesses with a one-size-fits-all rating. Instead, Course continually calculates your personal compatibility with restaurants based on the information you provide through fun personal taste quizzes and your private ratings of the restaurants you’ve visited.
Course Restaurant Guide uses artificial intelligence to find the common ground that exists between people with similar tastes no matter how few or far between…and - if you’re a list person (like I am - I have a list for every city I visit…and for the ones I want to visit) Course gives you a way to organize your lists of places friends have recommended or that you’ve seen online or on tv.
We’re extending the no-strings attached introductory offer of a 3 MONTH FREE TRIAL through the month of January so, if you’re interested - you can start rating restaurants privately today and find more restaurants you’ll love at TryCourseApp.com.