When Jared Rivera founded Chefs Feed with his brother Steve Rivera in 2011, he was living the foodie dream. He had to fly all over the U.S. to interview some of the country’s most acclaimed chefs for a series of video spots shown for Virgin America, Chefs Feed’s primary sponsor.

He visited 500 restaurants and as you might expect, he got to some pretty amazing food in the process. He also gained 25 lbs. and contracted gout. When he got back to San Francisco he walked on crutches for weeks. “He sacrificed his body for Chefs Feed,” CEO Steve Rivera quipped in an interview with GigaOM.

At first glance Chefs Feed seems like so many other social eating/food porn apps like Foodspotting, Forkly and Nosh. It’s rife with pictures of luscious dishes from acclaimed restaurants, but you quickly notice what’s missing.

There is no way for you or I to upload a dish photo or make a dish recommendation, and the Riveras like it that way. The only people who can recommend a dish are the 600 professional chefs that make up the Chefs Feed roster of curators. From the Riveras perspective, serious eaters want to know where Mario Batali (Babbo, Lupa) eats in New York and what Thomas Keller (French Laundry) eats in San Francisco — not the selections of some random dude with a smartphone and a few too many whiskey sours.

That might sound snobby, but then again “foodie” is just a newer word for “food snob”. Chefs Feed is going after the type of diner that obsesses about their meals, and that audience doesn’t want just anyone recommending what food they eat.

The web and mobile apps have done wonderful things for the democratization of the restaurant review. We’re no longer dependent on an elite group of food critics to tell us where and what to eat. Instead we crowdsource, each of us handing out stars on Yelp and uploading images to Foodspotting. But the Riveras — who ran a restaurant public relations firm before committing full time to Chefs Feed – would argue crowdsourcing has gone too far. By soliciting everyone’s opinion, you really have gotten no opinion at all.

Chefs Feed’s approach splits the difference. Rather than aggregate the recommendations of critics or the masses, it collects the opinions of professionals successful in their craft. For the most part, those chefs run their own restaurants and several are celebrities in their own right — such as Keller, Batali, and Wolfgang Puck — while many would only be known to people who closely follow their local food scenes. A participating chef can recommend and upload a photo of any dish, as long as it’s not one of their own.

When Chefs Feed launched last year it was a pretty bare-bones iPhone app, allowing you to select one of four cities and then giving you a list of dishes from specific restaurants that local chefs had recommended. Since then, Chefs Feed has expanded to 15 U.S. cities and overseas to London, and in October it launched a new version of its iPhone app that adds much more information about individual dishes, chefs and restaurants.

But the new version also adds a layer of social networking, so Chefs Feed users aren’t reduced to passive participants. Only chefs can add new dishes, but users can comment on those choices, communicating with chefs and their friends.

“You can eat your way through San Francisco, and show all of the dishes you’ve tried,” Steve Rivera said. But the app is meant to be more than just a recommendation engine, he added. It’s meant to be a tool for connecting chefs to the public, allowing them to communicate directly with their patrons and fans as well as participate in a larger dialogue with the culinary community in their cities. Chefs aren’t just submitting their own dish recommendations, they’re actively commenting on the picks of other chefs and feedback left by diners, Rivera said.

Ultimately the Steve and Jared Rivera want Chefs Feed to grow into a digital media company, becoming a specialized network where professional chefs will promote their restaurants, food, cookbooks and future plans. The company still has a lot of growing to do, though. Chefs Feed is still only available on the iPhone, where it has been downloaded about 200,000 times. Compared to the food mega-apps like Yelp and Foodspotting, it’s tiny. But Chefs Feed has raised $1 million in angel funding, and it’s not just attracting the attention of some of the country’s most prominent chefs. It’s attracting interest in Silicon Valley tech circles. Former Twitter VP of product Satya Patel and former Expedia CFO Mike Adler have signed on as advisors.

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Called On the Road, the app shares many features with popular foodie apps Yelp, Urbanspoon, Nosh, and Forkly, but it’s fundamentally a different animal. Rather than crowdsource information, reviews and photos, all of the content in the On the Road is drawn from the Food Networks own TV and magazine programming.

That may seem like a limiting factor, but the Food Network has a lot of programming. A search for restaurants near my north side Chicago home yielded 23 businesses within a two-mile radius – ranging from upscale establishments, diners, bakeries, and hotdog and burger joints.

While the app can be used to simply find a random place to eat, most of the features are built around FN’s programming. Separate sections are included for each of FN’s TV shows, and you can search by chef as well — many of FN’s personalities bridge multiple TV show. So if you like the show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” you can bookmark the restaurants Guy Fieri features on the show or you can recommend them to friends through built-in Twitter, Facebook and email buttons.

If you really like “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” you can use one of the app’s key features to generate a “road trip” highlighting every one of the taquerias, greasy spoons and fried chicken joints appearing on the show in a particular metro area or region. Food Network is trying to tap into peculiar emerging phenomenon: the foodie road trip. It’s included several pre-defined road trips with the app, either centered on particular cities like New York or San Francisco or on regional cuisine, such as Texas BBQ. But the app also allows you to easily generate your own tailored road trips and has a built in badge-based reward system for customers who complete those treks.

It’s a slickly designed app, but it’s definitely not for everybody. If you love the Food Network, then you’re going to love On the Road. But anyone looking for a more general-purpose restaurant recommendation app might be disappointed. There’s very little information about the individual restaurants beyond location data, a brief description, and a URL; and all establishments are treated equally – there are no stars or reviews.

But that’s the point. In an interview earlier this year, Food Network GM of digital Bob Madden told me that FN’s digital and mobile content strategies are built entirely around the concept of supporting its more traditional TV and magazine programming. Ultimately FN’s chefs are the curators of On the Road’s content and do they do their curating on TV. The app is intended to provide an interactive complement to that programming.

There are exceptions to that strategy though. In April, FN launches an interactive cupcake cookbook for the iPad that contained content unique to the app.

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Imagine Meetup cross-pollinated with Groupon and Open Table and you get the idea. Grubwithus forms local social networks – right now focused on New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco – allowing people to gravitate to groups with similar interests, whether it’s architecture, travel or the love of raw fish. Rather than keep those social interactions digital, though, Grubwithus provides the tools to book group meals at local restaurants.

Grubwithus negotiates deals with each restaurant for prix fixe menus, determines tips, handles booking and even divvies up the bill through its online payment system. All you have to do is show up and, well, be social, which in this case also includes paying your own drink tab. For restaurants it’s a means of generating guaranteed business and marketing themselves without resorting to steep the steep discounting of Groupon and other social couponing services (though Grubwithus does seem to negotiate some pretty impressive deals).

So far, the service seems more focused on the social aspect rather than tailoring the specific dining experience. For instance, when setting up a meal, Grubwithus selects the restaurant based on your price, dietary and location preferences, though you are allowed to make requests. If the idea is to build your social dining experience around a specific restaurant or menu, you may be out of luck. But that also appears to be why Grubwithus needs the funding. It plans to use the money to expand its restaurant portfolio as well as boost its marketing efforts and launch in more cities, both in the U.S. and internationally.

Grubwithus is one of the many “in real life” companies that are popping up in the food and dining space. Targeting diners makes perfect sense. What more perfect way to make the awkward transition from the digital ether to the real world than over a meal and drinks?

The business, however, hasn’t been kind to all who have tried it though. Startups like Spoondate and Housefed have shut down their services, but that hasn’t stopped other companies from taking a crack at other social dining models. Danielle Gould at Food+Tech Connect has written up interviews with two of the more fascinating startups connecting people online to the meals they want to eat: Zokos, a digital party planner and event manager, and Gusta, which targets the trendy “supper club” space. Gould also interviewed Grubwithus founders Eddy Lu and Daishin Sugano last year when the company was just getting off the ground – definitely worth checking out.

Grubwithus started in 2010 in Venice, Ca., and raised a $1.6 million seed round through Y Combinator and a group of venture capital firms and angel investors including Ashton Kutcher, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Aviv Nevo, and others. The $5 million Series A round was led by Los Angeles VC firm GRP partners with participation from Lebanese entrepreneur, Michel Daher.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user corepics

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Screenshot of Foodie (click to enlarge)

Glam Media, the online media company that produces content and serves ads for a primarily female audience, on Thursday is launching a new website Foodie.com, its first foray into the culinary space. Social networking features will be built into the new Foodie website, making it the first site from Glam that deeply incorporates the technology acquired when it bought Ning in late 2011.

A launch with great expectations

In an interview this week, Glam CEO Samir Arora said he expects Foodie to very soon become one of his company’s top most highly trafficked sites. “One year ago, we discovered that our top ad category in revenue during the first quarter of 2011 was food. We didn’t even have a dedicated food category at that time,” Arora said. “That really drove us to sequence Foodie as an important launch.” Glam expects Foodie.com to attract 10 million monthly uniques soon after it debuts — a very impressive draw by most standards.

At launch, Foodie will feature content from prominent chefs, restauranteurs, established food critics and bloggers, and ads from companies including Betty Crocker and Dannon Activia. The real key news about the site, though, is that readers of Foodie will be able to fill out complete social profiles to let them interact with each other and Foodie’s content creators and brands. Glam describes Foodie.com like this: “A full social network for consumers to directly discover, connect and follow top foodies.”

Still an appetite for social media

But will people really want to create yet another social media profile? Glam certainly thinks so. According to CEO Arora, that’s because sites like Facebook are just too general to help us connect with our individual interests like food. The people with whom you’re friends on Facebook may not be the same people with whom you’re interested in sharing recipes. “When I connected my Facebook graph to my Yelp account, I found that I have nothing in common with my friends in terms of our restaurant tastes,” he said.

It’s a fair point — as popular as general social networking sites have become, people still go to specialized content producing sites on the web. Facebook’s Timeline and Open Graph is trying to turn Facebook into a central place where people can customize their ideal web experience content and all, but perhaps people will still want to keep separate online niches where they deal with people who align with them along very specific interests. Foodie.com wants to be the place people go to read and connect with like-minded people about all things culinary.

Food may be just the beginning

Arora said this push toward social was always the direction in which Glam planned to go, and that the Ning acquisition which closed in December accelerated the process. “Otherwise, if we had to build it ourselves, we’d probably take five years.” If Foodie is the success it’s expected by the company to be, other verticals in Glam’s portfolio could go the social route as well.

It’s an ambitious move to make, but Glam already has such a massive audience — 220 million unique visitors a month, 90 million of them in the United States — that if anyone besides Facebook is going to turn itself into a totally social content web destination, it’s them.

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