Epicurely v1 - Design Sneak Peak
Over the past couple of months our team has been working diligently to bring Epicurely to life. Between the three of us, we have traveled thousands of miles working across multiple time zones (New York to London to Tokyo to Bogota to San Francisco), but thanks to the glories of the Interwebs and innovations like Gmail, Skype, Dropbox and Basecamp, we’ve made steady progress on what we expect to be a kick-ass product.
While we’re not quite ready to open Epicurely up to the world, we are excited to be able to share some screen shots of the latest designs with you.
The first screen provides you with a glimpse in to how users will discover nearby “feasts” in their area. Users will be able to see when the feast is, the type of feast it is, who’s hosting, who’s invited/attending, etc.
The second screen is for a specific feast. Here you can dig in to the details, see who’s going and what they’re contributing (food, drinks or cash), RSVP to the event, as well as post comments and pictures.
Pretty cool, huh?
We’ve had the good fortune of working closely with a talented and passionate user experience & design agency in San Francisco. Our friends at Momentum Design Labs worked closely with us to evolve initial mockups, wireframes and rough designs into a cohesive and elegant user interface. We threw lots of ideas at the wall, saw what stuck, and worked iteratively to achieve a design we are all proud of.
We’re pretty excited and we hope you are too…
Epicurely v1 - Collaborative Dinner Parties
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.
Searching for top “social chef” talent
What is a “social chef”?
We all know amazing cooks in our network of friends and family. These people don’t necessarily need to have worked at a restaurant or have been professionally trained.
For instance, my sister happens to cook some of the most delicious ceviche I’ve ever had, yet she only cooks occasionally at home. A close friend, from the heart of the American south, was known to cook some of the juiciest braised pulled pork sandwiches in college. Another one is notorious for going all-out whenever he hosts a bbq, oftentimes sharing with guests some of his Brazilian culinary heritage, including tender picanha char-grilled to perfection.
I would classify all of them as top-notch “social chefs”.
Contest to identify the best “social chefs” in London
We’d like to inspire a social movement to identify the very best cooks in our communities. Together, we can uncover the hidden talent among us and help expose it to the world.
To start, we will focus on the city of London, a melting pot of culture and culinary talent.
How will it work?
We are building a page to host the contest. Stay tuned for the URL. On this page, you will be able to nominate yourself or friends for a particular food category. Visitors will then be able to vote for nominees, thereby endorsing their culinary prowess!
Start thinking about friends to nominate. We will begin accepting nominations formally in a few weeks. In the meantime, you may post nominations to our Facebook page or in the comments section below.
Food categories
Based on discussions with foodies and friends in London, we came up with our initial list of food categories.
We want this initiative to be a collaborative one and we’re excited to hear your ideas. If you have any comments or suggestions, please post them to our Facebook page or leave a comment.
If anyone feels that a particular branch of food is not well represented, be it a style of cooking or cuisine from a part of the world, please share your thoughts!
Cheers!
Epicurely Coming Soon!
Please visit our coming-soon page! Register to gain early access to the Epicurely community!
Epicurely: connecting people through food
Food touches all of us
Wherever I happen to be, I’ve found that people are genuinely happy to share their food traditions and customs. People have emotional connections with food that run deep. These connections are part of who we are. They are part of our personal and cultural identity. Food touches the best in all of us, which is why we’re so open to sharing our food traditions with others. Food evokes warm memories from the past; vivid recollections of our favorite meal as a child, exotic flavors from a memorable trip, the culinary traditions of our home country. Oftentimes, these memories present themselves in full force, transporting us to distant times in an almost unparalleled level of detail. Marcel Proust famously captured these sensations in his novel, In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past).
When from the distant past nothing remains, after the beings have died, after the things are destroyed and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, yet more vital, more insubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of everything else; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the immense architecture of memory.
Yet again I had recalled the taste of a bit of madeleine dunked in a linden-flower tea which my aunt used to give me… immediately the old gray house on the street where her room was found, arose like a theatrical tableau…[1]
Like Proust’s madeleine, even the most negligible, the most unexpected treat, has the power to evoke rich involuntary recollections that may otherwise lay dormant for years. Food is deeply rooted in our warmest memories and thus, it’s easy to understand why we feel a sense of pride, an implicit awareness that we’re sharing part of our personal story, whenever we share our food traditions with others.
Food bridges social and cultural barriers. It’s a universal language that connects us regardless of who we are or where we come from.
Epicurely’s Mission
We are on a mission to empower anyone who loves cooking to share their food with others. We want to make it easier for people to organize food-related events and meet others sharing similar interests. Concretely, we are creating an online marketplace for home chefs to share their creations and spaces with food enthusiasts in their area.
Please subscribe to our blog to receive all the latest news, updates and photos as we turn Epicurely into a reality and help connect people through food!
The team behind Epicurely
Santiago (@SirTeno), Kim (@Kimtaro), Kirk (@McMurrak)
[1] Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (1913) in: À la recherche du temps perdu vol. 1, p. 47 (Pléiade ed. 1954)(S.H. transl.)
