We’ve all been there. Hunger pangs are coming on, but you’re totally at a loss of what to quell them with. Thai? Nah, you had that last night. Pizza? Not in the mood. Certainly, there are no shortage of food delivery services in Boston to solve your feeling of starvation — but when you have no clue what you want to eat, the process of peeling through menus is pretty overwhelming. Fortunately, a team of five Harvard Business School students — and self-proclaimed foodies — have developed Dinder, an iOS app that provides visual inspiration to help you figure out what you want to eat.
And yes, the name is a portmanteau of dining and Tinder.
Co-founder Madeleine Goldstein, who previously worked at the NYC startup Artsy.net, told me that the idea came about while she was casually using the dating app.
“I was hanging out with my friend, Spencer,” she said in an email. “We had been trying out Tinder and Hinge and were having fun deciding to swipe right or left. Yet when it came to dinner, choosing what we wanted to eat was a painful struggle. We realized that those hungry for romance need food, too.”
Here’s how it works. After entering your location, the app will offer a selection of restaurants within your proximity to his/her location. Then, you’ll be shown photos of a range of dishes from those eateries, and one by one, you can decide whether you want to “favorite” it by swiping right. Once you’ve done that, you can return your tab of favorites at any time. Currently, Dinder features six Boston restaurants representing a range of cuisine from Mexican and Thai to American and Indian. The HBS students say they curate the selection of restaurants based on quality, type of food, and neighborhood. They then applied an additional curatorial approach to choose the dishes features from each based on their popularity and practicality in terms of delivery. While right now Dinder only offers restaurants in the Boston and Cambridge area, the team says it will quickly be scaling up to include other areas around The Hub as well.
The beta test for Dinder kicked off a few weeks ago and the team expects a full public launch next week. As they collect data on the back end from users, they plan to build out a tool to refine the recommendations and personalization aspects. They’ll also be rolling out a new feature that lets users filter options according to their preferences.
Bottom line: The idea is intriguing. As far as the name goes, though, we're not so sure it's a keeper—might say we're as skeptical about it as we are about — well, our Tinder prospects.
Image of sushi via Shutterstock. App screenshot via Dinder.
