Overview
Tasted Menu is a website and mobile app offering diners an unmatched way to…
- Make more informed ordering decisions
- Discover new dishes and restaurants
- Record and share their dining experiences and expertise
- Follow the dining adventures of friends and connoisseurs
The company accomplishes this by combining dish reviews and photos from its passionate user community ("taste") with its highly proprietary, company-generated culinary taxonomy and menu database ("menu"). Tasted Menu differentiates itself from other products in the dish recommendation space through its emphasis on high-quality content and structured, intelligent data. It aims to become the primary destination for anyone who finds themselves asking…
- "What's good to eat here?"
- "Where can I find the best?"
- "What are people eating right now?"
Tasted Menu was founded by Alex Rosenfeld and is headquartered in the Coolidge Corner neighborhood of Boston. Follow us on our blog, Facebook, or Twitter. Check out our introduction video below.
History
Tasted Menu has its origins in the fall of 2008, when the company's founder, Alex Rosenfeld, was in his second year at Harvard Business School. Procrastinating from reading case studies and eagerly awaiting dinner with friends at Ten Tables, Alex pulled up the restaurant on his go-to review websites and began looking into what to order. After ten minutes of sifting through unstructured reviews hardly focused on the food itself, he gave up. All was not lost, though. Staring at the restaurant's menu on its own website, the first piece of the concept for Tasted Menu fell into place, an application that, by blending reviews and menus, would help people easily identify the top dishes at restaurants.
The second piece of the concept emerged a few weeks later while Alex was reading the lobster roll write-up in a local magazine's "Best of Boston" issue. People love to talk and write about where to find the best food in town, it occurred to him, be it lobster rolls or hamburgers or fried chicken. If this application were to not only provide menu information but classify dishes themselves based on an intelligent and comprehensive taxonomy, it would just as easily serve as the definitive source for finding the best dishes in any food category imaginable.
With the core vision in place, Alex began working on Tasted Menu full-time after finishing his MBA. The company's second employee, a then recent graduate of a top Masters program in Food Anthropology, built out Tasted Menu's culinary taxonomy with the support of 30 students culled from the culinary societies at universities throughout Boston, including Harvard, BU, Tufts, and Wellesley. This database, an unprecedented taxonomical undertaking in the online and offline food world, presently consists of over 6,000 dishes, ingredients, and cuisines.
Tasted Menu publicly launched in its home market of Boston in November 2011 and, marking the start of its national expansion, launched in Austin in February 2012. Concurrent with its Austin launch, the company debuted its initial mobile app for the iPhone. Driving this progress has been a team that includes former employees of Square, TripAdvisor, and Google. Also core to this growth has been Tasted Menu's team of Menu Curators, who hail from such institutions as the Culinary Institute of America, the French Culinary Institute, and the James Beard Foundation; such restaurant kitchens as David Chang's Momofuku, Grant Achatz's Next, and Thomas Keller's Bouchon; and such media properties as Bon Appétit, Cooks Illustrated, and Food52.
Angels
Tasted Menu is grateful for the support of its angel investors, including…
- Tamim Mourad, Founder and former CEO of PriceGrabber
- Russell Siegelman, CEO of Santa Rita Ventures and former Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins
- Thomas Lehrman, Co-Founder of the Gerson Lehrman Group
- Andre Gardner, President of Argos Management
- Michael Katz, Founder and CEO of Interclick
- Ralph James, Former President and COO of First Marblehead
- James Hankins, Professor at Harvard University
- John White, Founding Partner at Moorgate and former head of Media IB at JPMorgan
- Avin Bansal, Investor in the Special Situations Group at Goldman Sachs
- Josh Abramowitz, Chairman of Deep Creek Capital
- Matthew Grodin, Vice President at Spectrum Group Management
- Nat Turner, Co-Founder and CEO of Invite Media
- Zach Weinberg, Co-Founder and President of Invite Media
- Greg Bettinelli, Senior Vice President at HauteLook
We'd also like to thank our fantastic legal team at Goodwin Procter, including Bill Schnoor, David Cappillo, and Jennifer Fang. Finally, a special thanks to Susan and David Rosenfeld, without whose unwavering encouragement this wouldn't be possible.