Ever dreamed of cooking a gourmet meal at home? Food start-ups now offer you pre-boxed ingredients for a top-notch dish. All you need to do is don your chef's hat and cook your dream meal
Have you heard of TV dinners — where you get a pre-plated meal, ready to eat? All you need to do is bung it in your microwave while your sitcom is on a break and then eat while you watch your favourite show. These days, with primetime soaps including cooking-based shows such as Masterchef or My Kitchen Rules, people are increasingly becoming inspired to cook. But instead of stocking your shelves with gourmet sauces, different kinds of pasta, meats, and exotic vegetables, wouldn’t it be easier if someone else did all the shopping and all you needed to do was cook it and show off to your culinary skills?
This is exactly what several food startups are doing: catering to the desire to cook and enjoy gourmet food. There’s a whole range of ventures to choose from: Haute Chef, Seven Sexy Dinners, Cook Gourmet, Chef’s Basket, Chefkraft, Cook Fresh, and For My Belly, to name a few. For as low as Rs 199, these companies send you a pre-boxed set of ingredients, along with a step-bystep guide to prepare the dish. This gives you the thrill of eating a gourmet meal, with the added satisfaction that you have made it yourself. And of course, you don’t need to step out to the supermarket and look for olives, kale or yellow peppers — they come with your order!
Take Cook Gourmet, for instance. It serves pre-boxed ingredients in Delhi NCR. Usually on offer are three vegetarian and three non-vegetarian dishes for the week, prepared by their chefs. So you can browse through their recipes for the week and pick a dish to order. Set up by an IIT Delhi alumnus Sanny Choudhary and his partner, Daman Singh Kohli, the company’s vision statement says: “We take care of everything right from helping you select a recipe to delivering its fresh ingredients fully pre-processed to minimise cooking time and effort, right at your doorstep. All you have to do is just spend a bit of your precious time cooking our exotic, and you’re ready to brag about your culinary skills to your friends and loved ones and have them marvel at the wonderful food you cook!”
When a person orders, she gets a cardboard carton with all the ingredients needed to cook the meal, a recipe with pictures and detailed instructions. It also gives you estimated cooking time and how to plate your dish. And viola, you have a fine-dining restaurant quality dish on your table in less than an hour. Says Upasana Luthra, of Madras Cooking Company, “I like experimenting with new recipes and when they come previously tried and tested, it doubles my joy.” Luthra teaches teens and kids how to cook simple dishes and ordering a dish from a food startup saves her a lot of time and effort, especially when it comes to cooking new dishes.
To experiment how well it works, the author ordered Fettucini pasta with spinach and white wine from Cook Gourmet, a company set up by two former engineers, who are now pursuing their passion for food. The box arrived within the stipulated two hours and had all the ingredients to cook the dish, except water. In less that 45minutes, I had perfect fettucine on my table! Of course, I did a little of my own experimenting and added sliced chicken ham to turn the vegetarian recipe into a nonvegetarian dish. It turned out so well, that my best critic, my son, too gave it a big thumbs-up.
The experiment seems to have attracted some big players, too. Zoravar Kalra, the man behind popular fine dining restaurants such as Farzi Café, Masala Library, and Made in Punjab, is also planning to enter this sector. The company plans to start operations soon in the capital and then move on to other metros.
Another trend for food startups that is catching up fast is getting home food made by home cooks as well as professional chefs. There are Bite Club, Hola Chef, Spoon Joy, Frsh, and Fresh Menu, to name a few. They sign up home cooks and professional chefs to sell their signature dishes online. The websites have lists of menu each chef offers and you can place an order for what you want.
One such person who delivers gourmet meals in Mumbai is former journalist-turned-chef, Garima Khurana Kochar. Her Vanilla Pods Kitchen dishes up simple, yet exotic meals, which are completely organic and locally sourced. She started with cakes and pastry but has now forayed into meals, since she found the “tiffin” service was not up to the mark. Not surprising then that she has an A-list clientele including Bollywood actors such as Kangana Ranaut. “I recently made a watermelon, caramelised pecans, caramelised onion, roquette and fresh-flower salad, and a layered quinoa with roasted bell pepper sauce, and garlicy almond-bean sprout topping. My star client loved both these dishes,” says Kochar, adding. “Our meals are either oil-free or made with the minutest amount of oil possible with natural, homemade whey being used as the base. We limit ourselves to a small number of clients to be able to take the greatest care in the preparation of food rather than treat it like a mass-produced item. From A-list Bollywood celebs to high ranking corporate execs, housewives and young professionals, our client lists are varied.”
But the reviews are mixed. For Anupama Jain, co-author of Crossed and Knotted, her expectations have been belied. “Being a vegetarian, your options get limited and I can rustle decent fare across cuisines, so you kind of get nit-picky. In my opinion, dal makhani is a test of a food deliverer’s benchmark. Very few live up to that. Most of these are for working people who are hard pressed for time.”
Others like Astuti Bhantanagar, who often orders from Bite Club, instead of a restaurant says, “It gives me a very ghar-ka-khana like experience. I can order food that’s not restaurant-y but home cooked.” And yet others want the gourmet experience. As Puja SS, puts it, “I want to grab a bite of the experience.”