Wondering where to go for a fabulous meal? A new fine dining app launched by Joanne Carter, BCom’90, and her Cordon Bleu chef husband Tadeusz Kolodziejczyk offers plenty of suggestions, tapping chefs from around the world to find out where they love to eat.
The for True Foodies only app features more than 200 participating chefs who can list their 10 favourite restaurants and wines. Pastry chefs and sommeliers also weigh in with their opinions on the app.
The impetus for the app came after the couple’s move to Chicago three years ago. “We were spending so much time trying to figure out [where] was a great place to eat,” says Carter. “We realized that it would be great if we could have one place where we could really trust the recommendations.”
Inspiration also came from Kolodziejczyk’s time at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. His friends and colleagues were “really obsessed with these great chefs,” eager to learn more about them and what they were doing next, Carter adds.
“He came up with this idea to build this kind of culinary community – like a sort of culinary Facebook.”
The free app, billed as “the culinary world in your pocket,” is available on the Apple app store, with an Android version planned for later this year. Launched at the end of January, it already has more than 5,000 downloads, “so we’re really excited,” says Carter, a Toronto native and a former senior marketing director at McDonald’s.
The app is aiming for an international audience and is available in eight languages. “Our target is to have 50,000 users by the end of this year and we’re on track for that right now.”
For quality control, the chefs and restaurants featured on the app are vetted by the for True Foodies only team or by participating chefs.
Chefs will be able to sell recipes through the app, which has more than 2,000 restaurant recommendations and over 2,300 wines in its wine database.
“It’s a social network for people who love food and chefs and restaurants and sommeliers. And the idea is we really build this kind of trusted community of people who are really into fine dining and the culinary arts,” Carter says.
Some chefs are including restaurants on their favourite list “that we’ve never heard of before, because there’s a restaurant [they love] in their hometown somewhere in rural Spain. But that’s just fantastic and you would never find [those places] through normal channels,” she says.
“We’re looking forward to having more and more of that – the kind of hidden gems that you’d only find because these chefs knew about them and recommend them.”
