App offers dining recommendations from chefs

Chefs Feed, an app that lets diners get restaurant and food recommendations from top chefs, launches Wednesday in Denver and Boulder as well as Las Vegas and SanDiego.

It's a small startup with big plans. Since it launched in San Francisco a couple of years ago, the chef-powered restaurant guide has received $1.15 million in funding, landed about 250,000 downloads and formed partnerships with 605 chefs around the country.

Before Wednesday it operated in 16 markets, including Boston, Chicago and New York.

The company, founded by brothers and former restaurant PR professionals Steve and Jared Rivera, is doing to expand its menu of offerings way beyond the mobile app.

Chefs Feed recently made a documentary series that it licensed to Virgin America airlines, landed a syndicated monthly column in Sunset magazine, and is in talks for a potential TV series deal that could be distributed by Scripps or Sony.

If it lands enough cash, it could also become an events producer, a data aggregator on customer information for restaurants, a commerce source for chefs and an author of guidebooks and cookbooks.

“Right now, we’re trying to figure out the best path of least resistance to find models that we can scale and monetize,” said founder Steve Rivera. “We’re not trying to do 100 things OK. We want to do a few things well.”