Thanks for considering supporting us.

Tastingmenu.com started out as a hobby for me and a bunch of friends. It's become a regularly visited website with tens of thousands of hits a month. People from all over the world visit, hopefully find useful information, and sometimes live vicariously through the eating experiences we document here. We don't do this to make money. But it costs money to do this nonetheless.

We pay for hardware, software, internet connectivity, photography equipment, phone calls, travel, and of course... food. We don't go out to dinner and beg for comps in exchange for a good write-up. We pay for dinner like everyone else. And given that some (but luckily not all) of the places we eat are rather pricey this can be an expensive proposition.

It's been suggested that we charge for access to the website. I don't have any ideological problem charging for the website, some adherence to a moral code that requires any digital creation to somehow be in the public domain and free for everyone. That said, I also know that 1) if we charged, we wouldn't make very much money as charging for content on the internet is a difficult proposition at best, and 2) if we were to charge, then fewer people could enjoy the site.

If we were to collect money in some way you might imagine we would spend it on the technology and food listed above. But the truth is that we'd likely spend almost as much money on technology, travel, and food with or without the website. But there are things we'd like to do that go beyond our current eating out budget. There are long term projects, events, content, and write-ups that frankly we need a capital investment to deliver. We'd spend the money either on the costs of putting on an event, or on hiring staff to start working on some of these projects on a more full-time basis.

So, if you enjoy the site, and would like to see more of it, as well as some of the special content and events we'd like to start delivering, please give what you can. Thanks to amazon.com Honor System for providing this service. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to let us know at give@tastingmenu.com.

Thanks.