A culinary + travel tech start-up situated in Allentown, Pennsylvania At the Indie Cultivate: An event series produced by the Independent Lodging Congress, Hawser presented the "Course Restaurant Guide" to leaders, visionaries, and investors in the hospitality business.

The event series includes a Shark Tank-style pitch competition, which Hawser's founder Josh Sapienza won as the best seed-stage startup. The event series is described by emcees Andrew Benioff and Bashar Wali as being "a third TED talk, a third SXSW, and a third ALIS Conference."

Course Restaurant Guide collects your lists of the places you want to try or have tried and don't want to forget, and it matches you with restaurants based on your preferences.

The course uses deep machine learning to understand its members' preferences and then determines each person's compatibility with restaurants and bars so that they can eat (and drink) like a local everywhere. This is in contrast to restaurant recommendation services like Yelp, TripAdvisor, The Infatuation, or OpenTable which recommend restaurants based on what's hot or popular in a given city.

Is the idea of individualized restaurant recommendations brand-new? No. No, not even close. However, those who have already achieved success, such as The Infatuation, Google, Trip Advisor, and Ness Computing (acquired by OpenTable), built their recommendation platforms with editorialized content or a strong reliance on what "other people think" (i.e., public reviews and social media activity). This was ground-breaking 5–10 years ago in the "pre-bot browsing era," and long before social media activity (i.e., Likes, Shares, and Comments) were monetized or charitably doled out to manipulate algorithms for greater exposure.

We acknowledge that taste is subjective, but because of the "Audience Effect" phenomena, we've discovered that our anonymous first-party granular data is the most trustworthy, illuminating, and immediately actionable data available. - Founder Josh Sapienza

After creating a profile, you're prompted to review 20 of the restaurants you already frequent privately and to complete many entertaining food-related questions. The application displays a variety of emoji faces that reflect your compatibility with various eateries as it eventually learns more about your specific taste.

With the addition of a social component and a lodging plug-in, Sapienza is looking for seed investment to finance further expanding the Course into the ideal digital travel companion for the food-loving lifestyle traveler.

Over the past few years, restaurants with limited marketing budgets have benefited from increased exposure thanks to social influencers on TikTok, Instagram, and even local restaurant groups on Facebook, but Sapienza warns: "We can still do a lot more to help those less well-known bars and eateries that not only make a big difference to the streetscape in their respective towns but also provide visitors with distinctive and memorable experiences. Our primary goal is to streamline the visitor's discovery process as time and resources become increasingly scarce."