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I had a 90% similar idea to Housefed and talked to Emile as well.

The main issue with Housefed / this thread's idea is that your site basically allows people to sell food without a permit. I would stay away from things like house events, because if even a few incidents happen at a house food event and people blog about it, you won't get in any legal trouble as long as you be careful in your TOS, but it's VERY bad PR for y'all. (e.g. remember the AirBNB fiasco?).

GrubWithUs makes sure their chefs are accountable for what they cook / prescreen all cooks. Private cooking is a whole another legal monster, lots of things to worry about. I think as long as you educate end users and watch how you word things legally, you should hopefully be okay :).

If y'all are ever looking to expand to Austin, let me know I'd be glad to help out / put you in touch with the startup community here!

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We've heard this a lot and couldn't agree more. Originally we tried to find a market of home cooks that wanted to host events but (fortunately) we couldn't find them which led us to the pros. They were easier to find and they have the added benefit of being legal and much less likely to poison our consumers.

That said, it's going to happen at some point. Someone will get sick, it's inevitable. We're prepared to do anything we can to reduce the impact of a media fire.

We're staying in NYC at first not just to make it feel more exclusive, but because it makes it easier to know ALL of our chefs personally. Which we do. So we feel comfortable putting diners in their seats.

Awesome, glad y'all have that figured out :)

I'm loving the site design btw, good work on that! How many of y'all are working on it by the by ?

Thanks for the kudos. It's just two of us. We both do "it all" but if we have a lot to do, we break up and I'll work mostly front end design, js, etc and Matt, my cofounder, will do back-end (django) cause he's way better than I am.

gluck