A restaurant directory built by the people who eat at them.
I started TakeOwl in 2020. The pandemic had every local restaurant near me hanging on by a thread, and the apps they relied on to keep their doors open were the ones taking the biggest cut.
I'd look at a $40 takeout order and try to work out what the restaurant actually walked away with after DoorDash took its piece. The math kept getting worse. The places I loved were doing more work for less money so a delivery app could sit in the middle.
The first idea wasn't a startup. It was a question. Could a city's restaurants band together into something more like the old Yellowpages, but more refined than Google Maps? An easy place to find them, kept up to date by the people who actually go, without a corporation extracting a percentage of every dinner.
That's still the spine of TakeOwl. Anyone can list a restaurant. Anyone can fix bad hours, add a missing menu, replace a stale photo. The directory belongs to the people who use it.
Where we stand
- Restaurants should keep most of what their customers pay them.
- A directory should be free for diners and cheap for restaurants.
- The people who eat at a place are the best ones to tell you about it.
- Bad information gets fixed because somebody noticed, not because a content team ran a sweep.
If you run a restaurant, the page for owners is over here.