The secret life of a private dinner is administrative. Before a chef plates anything lovely, somebody has collected the head count, the allergies, the menu choices, the address, the arrival time, the deposit, and the increasingly urgent question of whether one guest really means no dairy or merely no obvious cheese. Max Porterkhamsy watched that information travel through roughly 22 emails. Then he watched it migrate to a concierge and into an itinerary. The meal might look serene. The inbox looked like a minor maritime disaster.
Porterkhamsy had a useful view of the wreckage. He had been the chef receiving the scattered details. He had also been the concierge trying to gather them. In January 2020, he began building Epicurate to give private chefs a way to run their businesses and connect with hospitality operators without so much message archaeology. Six years later, the company had become a wider platform for in-home experiences, Journey had acquired it, and Porterkhamsy had joined Journey as head of dining and experiences.
The barbecue-sauce years
The route to software began on a farm in rural New Hampshire. Porterkhamsy has described growing up with community-supported agriculture before most people had learned to say CSA. There was no nearby grocery store, so produce and milk came from the farm. Food was local because geography had settled the matter.
At about six, he declined the conventional childhood refreshment business and made Max's Marvelous Barbecue Sauce. He mixed it, sold it, and remembers that people seemed to like it. This is a wonderfully small origin story. No garage, no pitch deck, no disruption of condiments. Just a child finding that ingredients could become a product if one was willing to ask a neighbor for money.
Adulthood briefly proposed a different menu. Porterkhamsy studied mechanical engineering and was considering patent law. He got most of the way through that plan before admitting that desk jobs did not suit him. A backpacking trip through Europe followed. When he returned, he looked at the work he had actually enjoyed through college: building houses and cooking in kitchens. A friend praised culinary school. Porterkhamsy enrolled.
He still speaks fondly of another abandoned ambition: becoming a Michelin Guide writer, traveling and eating in serious restaurants for a living. Instead he earned a culinary arts degree from the Culinary Institute of America and worked at Le Bernardin in New York. The critic's notebook gave way to the cook's station. It was probably the more useful education for what came later.
A table in Sonoma
California changed the scale of the dining room. At The Reserve Room in Kenwood, Porterkhamsy developed intimate seven-course food-and-wine tastings. A guidebook compared the experience to The French Laundry at a $35 price point, a sentence with the economic logic of a typo. Vacation homeowners from Silicon Valley began asking whether he would cook at their houses. Those requests became Vine Dining, his first company and a private-dining operation built around Northern California ingredients and wine pairings.
Private cooking offered a different kind of theater. The menu could belong to a particular family, in a particular house, for a particular evening. Porterkhamsy has written about cooking at villas, luxury retreats, and intimate gatherings, including an occasion when a private plane arrived to carry him to the engagement. The plane was glamorous. The spreadsheet awaiting him was presumably less so.
He valued the changeability of the work. One assignment might be a tasting menu in a seaside villa, another the comfort food for a family gathering. A restaurant asks diners to enter its world; a private chef enters theirs. Porterkhamsy has said the difference is not only personalization but connection. Guests can hear where a chef came from, what shaped the menu, and why a local ingredient belongs on the plate. For the cook, gratitude arrives without passing through the layers of a dining room. He saw the work as creatively liberating and personally meaningful, even when the logistics around it lagged behind.
For stability alongside Vine Dining, he became concierge and operations manager for Exclusive Resorts in Sonoma. That decision supplied the missing half of his future company. At dinner he could be the provider making the experience. At work he could be the operator arranging providers for guests. The same service had two sets of frustrations, and he could no longer mistake either set for user error.
“Personalization is the first thing.”Max Porterkhamsy on what private dining adds to travel
Dinner as the opening wedge
Epicurate began with private chefs because this was the category Porterkhamsy knew at a cellular level. A booking had to preserve the chef's style while making menus, special requests, schedules, and payments legible to everyone else. It also had to respect a market built on reputation. His early recruiting method was referrals from chefs and clients. He wanted providers to recommend the platform because they trusted the company beside them.
This matters because marketplaces are often tempted to make the supplier disappear. Porterkhamsy's public writing takes the opposite position. He has argued that chefs and other experience providers should retain their independence, identity, and the credit for their work. Software should handle the repetition without sanding away the person. The provider is not the inconvenient variable. The provider is why the guest will remember the evening.
The narrow entry point traveled. In July 2024, Techstars reported that Epicurate had expanded from six chefs in three markets to 100 chefs in 40 markets over nine months. It was targeting $4 million in private-chef bookings for that year, with an average order value of $2,700. The numbers were reported during the company's time in the Techstars Anywhere Spring 2024 cohort, when its description was already broadening from chef platform to booking engine for in-home luxury experiences.
The expansion was logical. A traveler staying in a well-appointed house might also want massage, yoga, grocery stocking, equipment, photography, or help with a celebration. Lodging operators wanted to offer those things but could not employ a local department in every destination. Epicurate could curate providers, expose the services in a branded storefront, and manage the operational handoffs. Dinner was the first course. The larger meal was everything a guest might do without leaving the property.
Porterkhamsy's early conversations with resorts and luxury retreats confirmed that demand before the catalog grew. Operators wanted personalized experiences for members and guests, but the necessary relationships were local and the work of coordinating them was stubbornly manual. Epicurate's provider network answered one part of the problem; its booking and business tools answered the other. For chefs, the promise was a route to clients without losing control of their menus or names. For concierges, the promise was fewer duplicated details. For guests, ideally, there was no platform to admire. There was simply the right person at the door at the right time.
Make the machinery quiet
There is an instructive tension in Porterkhamsy's work. Hospitality depends on specificity, while software depends on repeatability. A tasting menu designed for six people in a Sonoma house cannot feel like a SKU. Yet dietary restrictions, payments, schedules, and provider availability cannot remain folk wisdom trapped in an inbox. Epicurate's product judgment lived in deciding what to standardize and what to leave human.
The company's business-to-business distribution sharpened that answer. Instead of waiting for a traveler to browse an open marketplace, Epicurate could appear inside the booking journey of a vacation-rental company or hospitality brand. The operator already had the guest's attention. The local provider already had the skill. The platform coordinated the introduction and the paperwork. A small hotel or rental operator could offer a larger amenity set without pretending to own every apron, yoga mat, or grocery basket.
“These experiences reminded me why I became a chef in the first place: to make people happy, one meal at a time.”Porterkhamsy, writing about private-chef work
Journey acquired Epicurate in May 2026 for undisclosed terms. The fit joined Epicurate's experience layer with Journey's lodging, loyalty, and guest-relationship platform. Porterkhamsy said the combination could connect a great meal or afternoon to an ongoing relationship with the traveler. His new title, head of dining and experiences, acknowledges that the original chef marketplace had grown beyond the table while keeping the table at its center.
His career now reads less like a series of pivots than a long apprenticeship in invisible work. Engineering taught him to notice systems. Kitchens taught him precision. Private dining taught him personalization. Concierge operations showed him the mess between intention and delivery. Epicurate turned those lessons into a product, then placed that product inside the journey of the guest.
Luxury is frequently described with materials: the thread count, the marble, the vintage in the cellar. Porterkhamsy's story offers a more operational definition. The expensive part is often attention. Someone remembers the allergy, introduces the right chef, arranges the time, protects the provider's craft, and keeps the guest from seeing the 22-message chain. When the machinery is quiet, the people get to be memorable.