What: Feastly allows you to capitalize on your inner-chef, cooking meals for strangers in your home orat one of Feastly’s 20 – 30-person venues
Expected pay: $30 to $50 per meal, before expenses
Where: primarily Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, but growing and willing to entertain adding chefs in new cities, if they’re cooking/serving in their own homes.
Requirements:
-pass a site screening, which includes answering questions about cooking and background;
-follow rigorous food safety handling standards;
-submit to periodic inspections
Review:
Feastly allows you to capitalize on your inner-chef, booking meals to cook for strangers in your own home or in one of Feastly’s venues.
The site charges a fee to both diners and chefs to use the platform — much like the much larger network at EatWith. However, what Feastly provides in the three cities where it operates, is an independent dinner venue, where you can feed 20 to 30 guests at a time. (EatWith’s venue is your own home, which is likely to accommodate a smaller audience.)
That can allow you to earn more money, since you’re feeding two to three times as many guests in a single night. However, it also requires more experience and preparation — possibly additional servers, too. Not surprisingly — since you get a location, as well as a site — Feastly charges more than EatWith.
The site adds 10% onto the price of the chef’s meal, and also retains 12% of the chef’s meal price. Thus, if you set your meal price at $100, Feastly would list your meal at $110, and give you $88 (your $100 minus the 12% fee).
What their chefs say:
Because they have restaurant space, you are likely to be able to accommodate so many more guests at Feastly’s independent venues than you could at home, says personal chef Christina Xenos. That means you can make a lot more money. Xenos, who charges $69 per meal, might clear $1,000 per night after expenses, for instance vs. the $350 or so she can earn when serving meals at her home’s 8-person dining area.
The flip side is that preparing and serving a larger group from an unfamiliar kitchen is also far more complex. Xenos thinks Feastly is perfect for someone with catering experience, but newbies might want to start cooking for EatWith before moving to the more complex challenge of Feastly.
