Free Best Food Writing 2015 by Holly Hughes Page B

format. Customers pay for an annual membership and then gain access to ticketed dinners, for which they also pay. Memberships cost between $100 and $200, depending on your city (in Los Angeles, it’s $175). The price of dinners varies but is comparable to other dinner events—around $80 per person, including booze and service.
    This model worked. It worked well enough that eventually Bordainick and Dinner Lab were able to expand from New Orleans to othercities. First Austin, Texas; then Nashville, Tennessee; then New York; and then, in September of last year, Los Angeles.
    Dinner Lab now is in 19 cities and has about 50 employees.
    Despite the membership fee, which effectively adds a big surcharge to the cost of dining out, people have signed up all over the country after hearing about it through word-of-mouth or local media. Most of the L.A. members I ask first heard of its launch through Daily Candy, the now-defunct lifestyle email newsletter.
    Bordainick now spends most of his time on fundraising. He has raised $2.1 million to date, much of it from one of the original founders of Whole Foods, even as new investors are being brought on board all the time.
    Bordainick himself is very much in the model of startup dudes. Young (28), tall (6 foot 3 inches), white, with a vocabulary that swerves easily into corporate-speak (he talks a lot about being “in that space” when discussing the directions the business might take), he relishes his role as an entrepreneur. When I first met him to discuss this story, he said he’d be wearing “a green hoodie and shorts—typical entrepreneur garb.” If he weren’t into food, he could be a character on Silicon Valley .
    A native of New York’s Hudson Valley, Bordainick moved to New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina to work for Teach for America. After that, he went to work in the mayor’s office. Then he worked in education technology, where he was immersed in a culture that thought data could save the world.
    Now he’s trying to use data to save dinner.
    Bordainick says the feedback component of Dinner Lab first was requested by the chefs working the pop-ups—often, they were trying out new ideas at Dinner Lab, dishes they thought were too experimental for the restaurants that employed them. A system was put in place, in which every dish at every dinner was rated. As the company expanded and the volume turned the feedback into data, Bordainick became aware of how valuable that much market research might be.
    â€œIt got to the point where we could predict trends before they happened. The fact that octopus is a huge ingredient now, that everyone’s using it? We knew that way before it happened,” he says.
    How? In part because octopus dishes score particularly high at Dinner Lab dinners but also because, when people sign up for a dinner,they’re asked why they bought tickets to that particular event. “We saw people saying they came for the octopus, for instance.”
    I find this hard to believe. People are choosing a night out, spending hundreds of dollars, based on one dish? But when I ask my fellow diners at the meal with the warm custard (which also has an octopus dish on the set menu) why they are at that particular meal, three different people say to me, “Because of the octopus.”
    Restaurants typically are viewed as risk-filled business ventures. They have a reputation for high failure rates and low profitability, with ingredients for success that are never easy to predict. Studies show that restaurant failure rates aren’t that different from other small businesses, but lenders still see them as much more precarious: It’s practically impossible to get a bank loan to start a restaurant. Hence the need for individual investors.
    And overnight success doesn’t always mean a place lasts. While there’s little definitive national data on restaurant failure rates, various local studies