Christmas morning, 1985. My father stands behind me with one hand raised — steady, commanding, protective. I'm five years old, sitting on a motorcycle for the first time in my life, ready to rip across the yard before I even know what a clutch does. He's teaching me restraint before I've learned recklessness. That's who he was.
My father built things with his hands.
Not in a poetic sense. In the literal, calloused, sawdust-under-the-fingernails sense. If something was broken, he fixed it. If something didn't exist yet, he made it. He taught me that anything in this world can be built, provided you have the right tools and know how to use them. That lesson shaped every single thing I've done since.
He taught me to work hard and to question everything. He taught me adventure — not the curated, Instagram kind, but the kind where you get on a motorcycle before you know what you're doing and figure it out while your heart is pounding. He taught me to go against the grain, to trust my hands and my instincts over whatever everyone else was doing. He was a simple man, and he was the best man I've ever known.
Food was my dad's thing. A good meal was how he celebrated. It was how he connected. It was how he showed up for the people around him.
In his final year, my father developed a gastrointestinal condition that made eating — one of the most basic, joyful parts of being alive — something that required real planning. Every meal out became a project. My mom and I would call restaurants ahead of time, read menus line by line, try to figure out what he could safely eat. We'd ask questions no host or server could answer. We'd search online for information that simply didn't exist.
Anyone who's ever had a dietary restriction — or loved someone who does — knows some version of this. The menu that hasn't been updated in two years. The website that lists hours but not ingredients. The guesswork. The “let me check with the kitchen” that never comes back with a clear answer. For us, the stakes were higher, but the underlying problem is one millions of people deal with every single day: it is way too hard to figure out what you can eat and where you can eat it.
When we did find a place where my dad could sit down and enjoy a meal without worry — that was everything. That was the whole world for an hour.
My dad passed away in January 2026. Our last meal together was Christmas Eve.
I think about that meal constantly. I think about how hard we worked to make it happen. I think about how it shouldn't have been that hard. And I think about the millions of families going through their own version of the same thing — right now, tonight — trying to figure out where they can take someone they love to eat.
That is why hello.food exists.
I built it because I watched my mom — the single most resourceful woman I have ever known — struggle to find basic information about what restaurants in her own city could safely serve her husband. That's broken. And I refuse to leave it broken.
hello.food started as an app for my mom. Something simple — tell it what you need, and it tells you where you can eat. But when I started building it, I discovered something that made me furious: the information didn't exist. Not in any usable form. Not anywhere. Restaurant menus — the most fundamental piece of food data in the world — were locked inside PDFs, photographed on phones, buried in websites that hadn't been updated in years. No AI could answer my mom's questions because the underlying data had never been structured.
So I built that too. Seven autonomous AI agents that crawl the web and extract menus from over 45,000 restaurants across 174 cities. Every single menu decomposed into individual items — ingredients, preparation methods, allergen data, substitution possibilities. The data layer that should have existed all along.
I built it because my father needed it. I keep building it because your father might need it. Or your daughter. Or your best friend. Or you.
This company will always carry my dad in it. Not as a marketing story. Not as a founder's origin myth. As the reason. The actual reason.
Every restaurant I walk into. Every owner I sit down with and ask to join this network. Every line of code, every agent deployed, every menu structured — it goes back to the same place. A man who built things with his hands, who taught his son that anything can be done if you have the right tools and the will to use them.
I have the tools now. And I will not stop.