FOOD .

Chain Gang

The meal-assembly trend promises more joy, less cooking.


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Published: Mar 28, 2007

Never underestimate the aromatic power of a home-cooked meal. Even if the home-cooked meal in question was handily prepped and assembled in a strip-mall storefront, transported to your home in a cooler and finished in a crockpot.

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED: Let's Dish customer Beth Mancini whips up a baggie of jerk chicken with pineapple salsa.

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"People love the smell of food in their house," says Rosemarie Danver, a real estate agent and mother of four, who understands just how enticing the scent of wine-country meatloaf or garlic mashed potatoes can be. She and her husband, Eric, opened a Let's Dish meal-assembly franchise in Marlton, N.J., last November.

At Let's Dish, customers can put together a month's worth of family dinners in two hours for about $3 a serving. They leave with freezer-ready dishes like fajita steak with chili-lime sauce and molten-chocolate cake, without having so much as lifted a knife.

The meal-assembly phenomenon, invented by Stephanie Allen and Tina Kuna of Dream Dinners in 1999, has since evolved into a major industry spawning national and regional chains, independent stores and even supporting businesses that supply meal-prep aprons, software and consulting services. The Easy Meal Prep Company lists 1,265 such businesses nationwide, with 32 in Pennsylvania and 14 in New Jersey. (Dream Dinners and Super Suppers lead the pack with more than 200 stores apiece. Let's Dish, by comparison, has 31 locations.)

The owners of these businesses say they've seen the future of American dinner, and it's in the freezer. Byrna Chalet and her husband, Bill, jumped in the meal-prep game when they read a newspaper article about it. "I only wondered why they didn't have these places when my kids were growing up," says Byrna. "But we started researching and we realized we could do this ourselves." Two years later, in the summer of 2006, their independent Who's Making Dinner was open to the public in Sicklerville, N.J., and now attracts customers from as far away as Radnor.

Meal-assembly setups vary, but typically there are several salad-bar-like stations, each one devoted to a particular dish. Before your shift — usually arranged online or over the phone — the store's staff readies the mise en place, complete with labels and appropriate measuring utensils. (Dream Dinner's Hawaiian chicken, which was available to "guests" last month, even came with cocktail umbrellas.) You follow the posted instructions, and add a little bit of this and a little bit of that into a plastic bag-lined crock — all without ever having to touch the ingredients directly. Most recipes culminate with a mixing technique that involves massaging the meats and sauces through the baggie. Finally, you affix a sticker with the relevant cooking instructions, to be followed at home at your own convenience. Et voila! Dinner is served and served and served again.

Dream Dinners devotee Annalie Korengel Lorgus is a hospice chaplain with three young children. She discovered the beauty of meal assembly when she had a baby last summer. "It's the greatest thing ever," she says. "It's fast, easy and it gets us around the table." These days, she's a regular at the Exton location, and she's even turned to Dream Dinners for her Thanksgiving feast. (She prepared everything on-site except the turkey.)

In a sort of public version of the kitchen-table coffee klatch, meal-assemblers bring their own friends or socialize with one another. Owners report that they've seen strangers bond over the prep stations and then sign up together for a return visit. Dream Dinners, Who's Making Dinner and Let's Dish are all also available for private parties. Byrna says that they are planning to install flat-screen TVs for Monday Night Football gatherings in order to up the number of male clients.

In an era when people are supposedly no longer making dinner at home, meal assembly gives even the most inexperienced cooks a can-do confidence. "We've had clients who have never seen olive oil in a bottle," says Danver. "But they're putting the meal together and they get all the credit." Never mind that; other than learning to read a recipe, there are no take-home skills in meal assembly — you don't really need to learn how to make fish when there's herb-crusted tilapia ready for the baggie treatment.

And why stop there? At Whisk and Spoon, another independent, owner Mary McCluskey has simplified the equation even further by removing the DIY assembly component. Instead, she has a Graduate Hospital-area storefront where she stocks the fridge with dishes like Sicilian beef Florentine and apple- and horseradish-glazed salmon. She says she's offering a better value and healthier fare than the average restaurant takeout. She has enlisted the services of a dietitian who will also be available on-site for private consultations.

In her view, the chains don't go far enough. "As far as I'm concerned, the model in the industry is flawed," says McCluskey. "Sure, it's great the first couple of times you do it, but it takes two hours of your day, and that's if there's not a line. I'm all about easy. The name of the game is convenience."

(e_ludwig@citypaper.net)

Dream Dinners, 1514 Paoli Pike, West Chester, 610-344-0321, www.dreamdinners.com; Let's Dish, 780 Route 70 West, Marlton, N.J., 856-983-6900, www.letsdish.com; Whisk and Spoon, 2521 Christian St., 215-545-0354, www.whisk-andspoon.com; Who's Making Dinner, 581-B Crosskeys Road, Sicklerville, N.J., 865-262-9992, www.whosmakingdinner.com.