After opening his own restaurant, Jacob DeHart created 'Porcini' to make back-of-the-house operations easier.

By Clara Olshansky
Updated August 30, 2017
Credit: Courtesy of

We've already seen apps that make the customer's life easier—apps that cut out the wait time, apps that check restaurants' health rating for you, apps that let you buy restaurants' leftovers for a reduced price, and so much more. But Porcini is here to assist with the other side of the restaurant business: it is designed to help restaurant owners and workers keep track of food orders, organize a central database of their recipes, and put together new menus.

The app was founded by Jacob DeHart, who not only co-founded Threadless, a website that helps artists get their custom artwork and merchandise out into the world, but also opened The Heritage, an upscale restaurant in Chicago's Forest Park suburb, with his wife in 2016. After DeHart and the restaurant's chef tried a variety of different software packages to manage operations, they discovered that none of them worked as well as they'd hoped. So, DeHart took it upon himself to make his own. "Being a programmer and software developer, I just felt like, you know, instead of paying this fee for software that we're not going to be happy with, I could just make it myself," he said in a statement.

Porcini may be able to make things easier for restaurant managers, owners, and chefs, as well as smaller establishments. The app is scalable, meaning everyone from a budding home-kitchen caterer to the manager of a thriving chain of fine dining establishments might find it useful. "It’ll work for small-scale and large-scale restaurants, even coffee shops and catering companies," DeHart told the Tribune. Software like CostGuard and ChefTec also exist to help restaurant managers, but DeHart promises that Porcini will differentiate itself with up-to-date features and its frequent upgrades. Currently, the team behind Porcini is working on a way to improve how restaurants keep track of employees' hours.

Interested entrepreneurs can get a free 30-day trial at After that, the app costs $79 per month for a single restaurant (with a 16% discount of $790 for a whole year), or $199 per month for a group of 2-5 restaurants (with the same discount of $1,990 for a whole year). If the app does everything it promises, it might well be worth the investment.