Matchmaking for cooks tries to find the right recipe

Dec 3, 2009, 10:58 GMT

Hamburg - Thomas Honold is a chef with hardly any free time. The 31-year-old works in his family's restaurant in Radolfzell, Germany on Lake Constance. As a chef, his working hours tend to be when other people are free. Nevertheless he doesn't want to give up hope on finding the love of his life.

Honold felt lost when he tried websites for singles on the internet, so he decided to solve that problem by building his own matchmaking site - gastrosingles.de - aimed at gastronomes. It's where cooks can find 'hot love,' where restauranteurs can be matched up with female managers and in general where 'every lid can find its pot,' said Honold.

His site now has 6,700 members and numerous offshoots for people who don't work in the restaurant business but who have the same difficulty meeting people. After all gastronomes aren't the only people who have to work while other people are out partying. Bakers, butchers, police officers, farmers, doctors and nurses can go to jobsingles.de to find other people who are in the same profession as them.

Honold estimates that about 150 couples have found each other through the site. Stefan and Anja Pauen are an example. After a long-distance relationship that lasted a few months she moved from Berlin to Viersen in north-western Germany where the two now run his parents' hotel and restaurant. They give an account of their first vacation, of moving in together and of the marriage proposal in a guest book available on the site.

'I haven't regretted it for a second because I feel eternally happy with him,' Anja Pauen writes at the conclusion of the account.

Honold typically worked on the site on Mondays when his fish restaurant located on the Mettnau peninsula is closed. 'Otherwise, I kept the laptop in the kitchen and continued constructing the site in between preparing dishes,' he said laughing.

He developed the software with friends and the site's network administrators work for free. The development costs and server fees totalling nearly 35,000 euros (52,820 dollars) have been covered thus far by Honold's cost-saving and his own funds. Income from advertisements match the cost of running the virtual matchmaking service, he said.

Thus far he's been able to offer the service free of charge. In addition to his cooking and programming skills, Honold also has a way with words. He demonstrates this with his light touch in announcing pairs that have found each other. 'Vintner finds a woman with a title,' reads one headline. Others describe how a 'rooster found corn' and a 'cakemaker found a cream puff.'

He also manages to maintain a level of seriousness, for example, in stressing that the site doesn't include any functionality for people seeking to start an affair.

It's important to Honold that the members of the site can exchange information about their careers. When registering at gastrosingles people are asked their favourite cuisine - five star, Thai or standard fare.

Thomas Eberhardt has been looking for a website like gastrosingles for years. The 37-year-old chef works at a family-owned business in Baden-Wuerttemberg, and like Honold, there's little time left for romance after all the hours he works. He has registered on the site in the hope of finding the right woman and likes the 'wink' function which allows members to make contact without text - the virtual equivalent of a long look at a disco.

Honold knows of couples who met through the website who already are expecting their first baby. He hasn't found his dream woman yet, he said, mumbling vaguely about a few friendships that have developed. 'But until now there is nothing concrete,' he said.