Over the past several weeks we’ve been working around the clock to build the first version of Epicurely.com. It’s been thrilling to see our vision take shape and evolve and we couldn’t be more excited. 

We are now very close to our first real milestone. Soon we will be launching our beta site which we can’t wait to share with the world, starting with our friends in the community of foodies in the UK, the US and beyond which has been so supportive over the past couple of months! 

So, stay tuned for news on our beta launch! Announcements will be coming in the next couple of weeks!

In anticipation of this exciting milestone, we felt that the time is right to share a little more background on our vision and what we wish to accomplish with Epicurely. Our followers have also been reaching out eager for a sneak preview and more information, so we would also like to share more details about version 1.0.

The mission of Epicurely is to democratize food by empowering regular people - sharing the common denominator of being passionate about food - to share their food with others. We are building a product that will lower the bar for anyone interested in organizing home-style dining experiences. Our product will provide the necessary tools to plan, promote, organize, and finance these events.

We want to enable a future where a new breed of authentic, personal, genuine, diverse, creative, spontaneous dining venues will emerge alongside traditional restaurants. These venues will not only offer delicious and genuine food alternatives, they will also offer real world social experiences of many flavors, limited only by the creative potential of the “Social Chefs” and the foodies attending the events. In other words, the diversity in character and theme of these experiences will be limitless!

Aspiring food entrepreneurs will be able to develop their cooking reputation online on Epicurely.com and gain recognition for their talent and unique styles. The barriers to entry to the restaurant industry 2.0 will become drastically lower.

Version 1.0 of the site will be a platform to organize collaborative dinner parties. The website will be closely integrated with Facebook and will solve logistical problems around planning, coordination and budgeting for a dinner party. 

We are building tools to make it super simple for anyone interested in inviting people over for dinner to plan and promote these events on a platform built and designed specifically for that purpose!

We’ve been thinking about how best to facilitate collaboration and group planning for dining events. We can’t wait to see how our users will use some of the potluck features that we’re building into version 1.0 of Epicurely! These tools will allow hosts to specify food, drink or cash contributions that their guests can then claim and bring to the dinner party.

Three words: simple, collaborative and free.

As a host, you will be able to know in advance how many people will be coming to your dinner and what each guest will be contributing by way of food, drink or cash contributions (if you specified any such contributions).

You will also have full control over whether or not your dinner party is public; i.e. visible to the Epicurely community or just to those directly invited. If you just want to organize a private dinner among friends (or friends of friends), you can do that, but you also have the option to publish the feast on Epicurely.com so that users visiting the site can discover it and request to attend.

We hope to see hosts gradually opening up their events to the community and turning Epicurely.com into the go-to site to discover fun, social and creative dinner parties around you, which, in our eyes, are a friendlier and much needed complement to traditional restaurants!