You're reading: New food service aims to save time for eager cooks with cash

Food lovers who like to cook, but can't be bothered to shop for ingredients and flip through cookbooks, are in the right city. Kyiv has a new online service called Personal Chef (www.lpovar.com.ua).

Started in March, the company services lazy and busy
cooks alike. Its website offers a choice of meals to order, but what you
actually get is a set of ingredients and cooking instructions in a cute paper
bag. The idea is to save the time and effort it takes to visit the local grocery
store.

The website guarantees that each meal’s preparation
time is under 35 minutes. Recipes are also available online.

The drawback is that the menu choices are very limited on
any given day, and it’s not necessarily cheaper to cook this way than to go to
a restaurant.

Andriy Denysenko, the founder of Personal Chef, says
that the menu was compiled by four chefs from Kyiv restaurants, and it gets updated
every two weeks. So far, people using Personal Chef give preference to dishes
with exotic ingredients like shark meat, he says.

Prices range from Hr 185 to Hr 245 for a two-course
dinner. Each set is designed for two people. For example, a dinner of grilled
salmon with mashed potatoes and white asparagus with Hollandaise sauce and
fried polenta will cost Hr 235. The price includes a detailed video and photo
cooking instructions.

“All ingredients are fresh, cleaned and washed. An incredibly
handy and useful thing for working people,” Irina Gorbunenko, a satisfied
customer, wrote on Personal Chef’s Facebook page.

Another customer, Vadim Klepik, said he was surprised
to find that even pepper, salt and olive oil were included in the set delivered
to him.

Denysenko told the Kyiv Post that the idea for the
startup came to him once after he spent an incredible amount of time searching
for a good recipe online, driving to the grocery, standing in line, driving
back home before finally he could start cooking.

“In Kyiv, one always feels the lack of time,” he says.

The service offers vegetarian meals as well. A set of
polenta terrine with vegetables, mozzarella and Gazpacho goes for Hr 185.

Kyiv Post intern Artem Babak can be reached at
[email protected].