Chris Stang built a business out of other people’s dinner plans.

At Dinerama, a food market in London’s Shoreditch, Chris Stang took out his phone to photograph a burger. A stranger beside him delivered the sort of verdict London gives away for free: did he have a food Instagram or something? He did. When he named The Infatuation, her attitude changed. She followed it. Out came her own phone, showing the accounts she knew.

The encounter happened before The Infatuation’s official London launch in 2017. Stang had arrived somewhere his reputation had already been. There is a pleasing economy to the scene: a person who disapproved of the photograph was already a customer for the photographs. The burger had become an awkward little piece of market research.

For Stang, restaurant advice was becoming a business that could travel without him. Its usefulness depended on an intimate proposition: somebody understands the evening you are trying to have. A restaurant can be excellent and still be entirely wrong for your dinner. Anyone who has taken a quiet parent to a deafening room has paid tuition in this subject.

Before the dinner reservation, the guest list

Stang grew up in Denver and attended Colorado State University, where he was music director at KCSU. His future co-founder, Andrew Steinthal, held the equivalent college-radio job at Ithaca. In their account of meeting in 2000, the setting was MTV’s Total Request Live. Destiny’s Child performed “Jumpin’ Jumpin’.” A mutual friend had invited them along. They had arrived as college-radio music directors and left with a future business partner.

Both went into the record business. Stang rose to vice president of marketing at Atlantic Records; Steinthal worked in publicity at Warner Bros. Their jobs involved shows, artists, managers, journalists, and the practical matter of feeding people before the evening got going. Choosing a restaurant became a skill acquired through repetition, with an unusually lively set of dinner companions.

“Music is a night-time sport,” Stang would say. Eating beforehand gave the two friends an education in New York. They became useful to people who needed a place for a date, a visiting parent, or dinner after everything sensible had closed. Those requests had characters and circumstances. The answer needed to account for both.

By 2009, they had started a restaurant site, originally called Immaculate Infatuation. Their preparation had come from being customers and from understanding audiences. A music marketer has to persuade somebody to care, return, and tell a friend. Stang’s new subject came with a built-in advantage: his readers would need dinner again tomorrow.

An occasion is a search term

An early public appearance at Google in 2012 captures the proposition while both founders still had music-industry jobs. They presented themselves as the friends people asked for recommendations. The categories described situations, including an early date or a night out with friends. A diner could approach the site carrying a problem rather than a restaurant’s name.

That is an editorial decision with consequences for the product. Cuisine and neighborhood narrow a list, but they leave much of the evening unexplained. The first dinner with someone and the fiftieth dinner with the same person can require different rooms. The site gave such distinctions a place in its organization, alongside the judgments about the food.

The insistence on an ordinary speaking voice also made its criticism recognizable. In a 2013 conversation about where the site belonged in the food world, Stang answered, “Outside of it.” He wanted the freedom to dislike a restaurant. Friendliness toward the reader needed room for an unfriendly verdict about an expensive evening.

That attitude survives in The Infatuation’s published reviewing rules: arrive anonymously, pay for meals, accept no restaurant favors, and make judgments after multiple visits. The casual tone has a bill behind it. Paying matters because the reader is about to pay too. A joke can make the judgment readable; the method gives the reader a reason to rely on it.

“We want to be able to say if we don’t like a restaurant.”

Chris Stang · 2013

A reservation at a restaurant that wasn’t there

Stang’s fictional restaurant Underfinger supplied a particularly pointed demonstration of his sense of humor. Its chef’s credentials included growing up near Noma and eating there. In the parody’s world, proximity had apparently become an apprenticeship. The review sent up a dining culture in which the story attached to a plate could become more elaborate than the plate deserved.

The invented menu grew increasingly ridiculous. There was meat arranged on a diner’s fingers, a fish-stick dish with carrot foam, and a pear presented on polished stones. These were jokes about the solemnity surrounding dinner, delivered through the familiar machinery of a restaurant review. The more confidently the machinery operated, the funnier the destination became.

In 2015, “Underfinger” earned Stang a James Beard journalism nomination in the Humor category. The institution had recognized a review of somewhere nobody could book. Later, the joke acquired a dining room for one night: Justin Warner and Do or Dine hosted an Underfinger pop-up. The joke now required catering.

The episode helps explain the personality of the writing better than an adjective could. Stang was willing to make the dining world look ridiculous, including its vocabulary and its appetite for novelty. His personal website still gives the nonexistent restaurant space in its brief introduction. It is an unusual credential, and clearly one he enjoys.

Five Es, and permission to join in

On Instagram, the same resistance to solemnity produced #EEEEEATS. Stang wanted people to participate without having to perform a polished version of restaurant expertise. The spelling sounded silly. That was useful. A photograph could belong to the conversation even if it would never belong in a magazine.

There was no mathematical explanation for five Es. In a 2016 interview about the expansion into Washington, Stang said the team had settled on five and treated that as the standard. He also accepted that plenty of people using the tag would never know who started it. Participation could spread farther than the attribution.

His Washington experience carried its own small illustration of how curiosity became inventory. When record-business work took him there, he would stay an extra weekend to explore restaurants. The eventual recommendations could include established places as well as new arrivals. The person making the guide had spent time being a visitor who wanted something worthwhile to do after work.

By then, advice was moving beyond a published page. Text Rex let people ask for restaurant recommendations by text and get a human reply. An incoming question supplied details that a page view could not. Someone had an occasion, a neighborhood, a preference, perhaps a complication. Answering meant listening before recommending.

The leap took five years

The founders kept their record-company jobs for five years after launching the site. In April 2014, they committed to The Infatuation full time. The independence came with a financial adjustment: Stang later recalled that they went without salaries for the first year and a half. A side project can have an appealing title and an unappealing payroll.

Earlier, a 2010 Turkey Leg Gala had offered a tangible sign of demand, selling 450 tickets in under an hour. People were willing to gather around the voice they had been reading. Events gave a relationship formed online somewhere to stand, talk, and eat.

The music background kept turning up in the business. Building a community around a band had given Stang a way to think about building one around a publication. As the company expanded, writing could no longer depend on two people’s evenings. Hiring writers and developing a shared voice became part of his job. The recommendation had to remain recognizable when somebody else made it.

Buying the guide he used to read

In 2018, The Infatuation acquired Zagat from Google. Stang had used Zagat himself when finding his way around New York. Becoming responsible for it made for a neat reversal: the reader of a restaurant guide had helped build the company that bought it.

Zagat brought a different tradition, drawing on diner surveys rather than the newer company’s individual editorial voice. Preserving distinct brands made sense of that difference. Restaurant discovery could accommodate more than one way of deciding whom to trust, even under the same owner.

Stang also carried his interest in approachable expertise into a book. How to Drink Wine, written with sommelier and restaurateur Grant Reynolds, appeared in May 2020. Its 160 pages offered readers a starting point, including 29 wines to recognize and help with navigating a list or a shop.

The collaboration gave the nervous customer permission to ask basic questions. Wine has plenty of opportunities to make a beginner feel examined. Stang and Reynolds offered an introduction built around understanding what you like. That is a familiar concern in Stang’s work: make the knowledge usable at the moment somebody needs it, with enough humor to keep the lesson companionable.

The dinner question reaches the bank

JPMorgan Chase announced its agreement to acquire The Infatuation in September 2021, including Zagat. The announcement promised that the publication would keep its independent point of view and distinct identity. To a bank investing in dining and experiences, an audience deciding where to spend an evening had an obvious attraction. To readers, the editorial promise remained something to judge meal by meal.

Stang’s responsibilities subsequently expanded into lifestyle at Chase, including dining partnerships and experiences. Today, he is Chase’s Chief Product Officer for Digital. His remit covers the mobile app, online experience, digital assistant, and agentic AI strategy. The person once helping friends select a dinner now works on the interfaces through which customers make many other decisions.

In May 2026, Chase’s mobile app ranked first among national banks in J.D. Power’s U.S. mobile banking app satisfaction study. Stang described the continuing work in terms of helping people reach the products and features they need. That language is less mischievous than Underfinger, as banking announcements tend to be.

The sequence invites a reading of his career: attention becomes valuable when it helps somebody act. At Dinerama, a stranger already knew the account before she knew the person holding the phone. The encounter compressed years of work into a few seconds. She recognized the recommendations. Stang could get back to his burger.