It is an unassuming first impression for a company whose clout could demand at least a lobby. On the Friday morning I visited in April I was welcomed by Jesse Rose, who runs The Infatuation’s product team.

5’11” with a broad and blindingly white smile, he still sported the modest tan he’d earned from a recent vacation. He walked me over to the open-plan kitchen, where gadgets swamped nearly every inch of counter space: an espresso maker, a coffee grinder, two different coffeemakers and, jammed up against the end, a beer cooler with a tap on top. “Are you hungry?” Rose asked. “We have a lot of snacks.” He flung open three deep drawers in the kitchen island, which were stuffed with Cheez-Its, Girl Scout cookies, Bark Thins and two dozen other kinds of processed delights.

“You would probably think we aren’t into junk food here. But we are.”

The Infatuation, which offers voice-y restaurant ratings, reviews and advice for cities, prides itself on this subversion: they expect people to think they’re snobby and delight in explaining that, actually, they aren’t. Most people who work there were users before they were employees, and the worst thing you can call someone here is the f-word – foodie, a designation which belongs to an earlier time, when the Venn diagram of food experts and everyday food eaters had little overlap. Instead, The Infatuation argues, anyone can be an expert if armed with the right information and a little initiative. To the company and its users, food is not an experience to be debated on Yelp but an imperative to try something new. And, perhaps because the company launched in ambition-fueled New York, also a bit of a competition.

Stang has a relaxed manner that feels authentic but fine-tuned. He co-founded what would become The Infatuation with his friend Andrew Steinthal in 2009, back when the two of them were record company executives. Nearing the top of the music industry ladder and known in their respective offices as the guys to talk to for a great night out, they started a food blog. Five years and reams of press coverage later, they quit their jobs and went full-time with The Infatuation, determined to create the world’s best restaurant discovery platform. By the time Stang brought Rose onboard in 2016, over avocado toast at Two Hands (Infatuation list: 21 Coffee Shops That Serve Great Food), the company had hundreds of reviews and were seeing more than a million monthly pageviews but were still operating out of a one-bedroom apartment in Chinatown where the handful of employees worked around a dining room table. Stand-up meetings were held in the kitchen and, if that space was taken, the bathroom.

The current office is considerably more spacious, with desks protruding from an exposed brick wall and three glass-walled conference rooms with plenty of room to sit down. Little jokes populate many surfaces:

Jorge Davila came to The Infatuation from Mommy Nearest, a parenting site with location-based recommendations that he co-founded with a friend. His time there helped to prepare him for his current project at The Infatuation: migrating over unwieldy data from Zagat, one of the most recognizable brands in the space, which the company purchased this year. Next to him sits Buck Heroux, the CTO; the engineering team has four people on it, so they work together closely, often via a shared Google doc where they hash out ideas before formal meetings. “It’s very collaborative here,” Davila said, “and we get to work on lots of interesting problems.”

The Infatuation may be unique in some ways, but many of its tech challenges are the same as any other growing startup. On Fridays, the office gets food delivery instead of catering, and by 1:30 pm the kitchen island had filled with brown bags from Made Nice (Infatuation list: 29 Great Places To Eat Something Kind of Healthy for Dinner). The whole staff gathered for a standing lunch.

Earlier in the day Rose had talked about how a background in food was a relative rarity among his coworkers, but now, over a salmon bowl, he revealed that his mother is the author of eleven cookbooks on Chinese food. Heroux pulled out a bottle of hot sauce and warned that it was pretty spicy. Rose asked if he’d made it. “Not this one,” he said, “but I’ll bring another one in soon.” Heroux, a native of Colorado, grew up eating a lot of Mexican food and now makes his own green-chili hot sauces in his Williamsburg apartment, which – coincidentally, he insisted – is a few blocks away from hot sauce mecca Heatonist. “They have a secret back room there that I want to get into,” he said, “but I can’t figure out what the criteria are. I even told them about making my own stuff, but it didn’t work.”

Coming from big tech – he previously worked at Palantir – he is wary of that culture’s deification of pure intellect at the expense of practicality. “This is gonna sound bad, but tech companies try to hire smart people at any cost, and we need more than that here,” he added.

To that end, he is willing to experiment with his team. Dina Smither, a product engineer, came onboard with a relatively short engineering resumé – she studied graphic design and had learned to code just a year and a half before being hired. “I felt like my design experience at my previous job had pigeonholed me as a UI engineer, and I wanted to be a frontend developer,” she said. “They were really open to my background.” At the time, product was nestled inside an agency; Smither helped to transition it in-house. She likes being on such a “tight-knit” team, she said, which is further bound together by Heroux’s disinterest in excessive engineering protocols. “It’s a lot of work with such a small group, but everyone is very easygoing and no one really gets upset,” she said. It’s a good environment for cutting teeth.

With the Zagat acquisition and talk of growth-fueled infrastructure, it’s clear that The Infatuation is well past its apartment-office mythmaking days; over the past few months, they passed the inevitable milestone of building out an HR and communications team. As CEO, Stang is himself working on maturing into a more traditional leadership role. He’s gotten better, for example, at reminding himself that even on Sundays, Slacks from your boss are hard to ignore. “I’ll get really excited about things, but I need to be more aware of not talking to people off-hours and pulling them out of their day,” he said.