You’re traveling with your wife and another couple and are having a hard time choosing a restaurant. Your party includes one person who is gluten intolerant, one who doesn’t eat meat and another who won’t budge unless the right vintage of cabernet is waiting for him. You just want a place that is quiet and maybe has a piano bar.
Where to go? Now there’s an app for your iPhone for that.
Attorney Phil Taub and a couple of members of his family recently launched dinemait, which uses artificial intelligence to help users choose restaurants based on their favorite foods and beverages, dietary needs, settings, locales and a variety of other factors based on personal data.
Like most law firms, Taub’s company, Nixon Peabody, has been testing out AI tools like ChatGPT to perform routine tasks. Now Taub wants to harness the power of AI to improving the dining experience.
Last year, Taub and his wife, Julie, were visiting Italy when they noticed the hotel restaurant they had visited the night before asked if they would like their “usual” drinks on their return trip, even though they stopped at a different bar in the hotel.
The hotel was keeping track of customer data to personalize the guest experience.
“We started to think about this a little bit,” says Taub, who with his wife co-founded the veteran assistance nonprofit Swim With a Mission.
“We’ve spent almost 30 years here in Bedford, and we’ve been going to the same sort of country club, the same restaurants for many years, and we generally order the same thing,” he said. “Food and drink.
Wouldn’t it be incredible if all the data about what we order is there? The restaurants, the clubs, they have all this data, right? They just don’t look at the data.”
Dinemait is designed to put the power in the hands of the user. Buy sharing their preferences users can customize their restaurant searches and also share their likes and dislikes with fellow users, similar to the way music fans share their playlists on Spotify and other music apps.
For now, dinemait is free to users. Taub and his cofounders, which include his brother-in-law and dinemait CEO Doug Winneg, and cousin Gideon Taub — both tech startup veterans — plan to add more features as they develop the app, which would lead to paid services.
Taub envisions dinemait becoming a useful tool for restaurants as well.
“When we have enough critical mass, the restaurants will then be able to look at it and have this important information,” he says.
“And they’ll be able to use it to create that wonderful experience every time.”
