Trying to score a choice restaurant reservation on Valentine’s Day can be heartbreaking, but a new Bushwick business allows diners to have restaurant-quality dinners in their own homes. One catch: they have to cook it themselves.
ChefDay offers a variety of unique meals from top New York City chefs which customers can order for 2,4,6 or 8 people, and the company delivers the appropriate amount of each ingredient for the dish, already cleaned and prepped. For each meal, the company also offers a video of the chef who created the dish describing step-by-step how to prepare it.
“I like cooking and I watch all the cooking shows, but I was always too lazy to get the food,” said co-owner Julien Nakache, who created ChefDay to take the shopping out of cooking. “I wanted to create a nice cooking experience for people and focus on the nice part, which is the cooking.”
“I’m not a good cook at all. I always cook the same, very simple stuff,” said Yasemin Etikan, 24, of Williamsburg, who had five people over to help her cook scallop risotto. “This was like I was cooking for a five-star restaurant.”
For now, the company only delivers ready-to-cook meals on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. Customers must order before 10 p.m. to get the meal the next day.
ChefDay currently offers 11 recipes on its site. The company plans to add one new meal per week through the winter, and in the spring it hopes to start adding two a week. The company delivers anywhere in New York City, but the majority of its customers are in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Kevin Adey, the executive chef at Northeast Kingdom on Wyckoff Avenue, donated the recipe for his pork tenderloin with peach and cabbage salad. He volunteered the time to make the video in ChefDay’s studios, saying he was happy to help.
“Anything that gets people cooking at home is good,” said Adey. “Too many people are relying on prepackaged meals and stuff you get at the grocery store that isn’t real.”
Reach reporter Danielle Furfaro at dfurfaro@cnglocal.com or by calling (718) 260-2511. Follow her at twitter.com/DanielleFurfaro.