An unexpected feast of DIY home dining
Why there is life beyond lockdown for the DIY dining kit
“A couple of weeks into lockdown, we were just fed up and wanted to do something,” says Tommy Banks, the 31-year-old chef and co-owner of Michelin-starred The Black Swan at Oldstead, near York. When the government forced restaurants to close back in March, to try and slow the spread of Covid-19, an army of hospitality workers was immediately rendered redundant.
“You feel like the carpet’s been pulled out from under you,” Banks says over the phone in August, a few hours before finally reopening the doors to his celebrated gastropub-with-rooms. It’s a couple of weeks since he reopened his second restaurant, Roots, in York’s city centre, albeit with almost a 50 per cent reduction in capacity owing to social distancing. “Obviously, we had to close both businesses and our farm as well, so we had all these questions about, ‘What are we doing to do with all this produce?’”
Added to which, Banks felt a duty of care to the three members of staff who’d recently relocated to Yorkshire to work for him yet didn’t qualify for the government furlough scheme; plus his suppliers, all family-run businesses whose trade disappeared overnight, along with his.
Simultaneously, those of us lucky enough to dine regularly in restaurants like Banks’s were tiring of the alternatives: Deliveroo, and our own, inevitably limited kitchen repertoires. Confined to our homes, we wanted freshly cooked food on our tables that would trick us into imagining we were actually eating in a restaurant.
And so the DIY dinner kit was born: professional kitchens prep and/or pre-cook dishes, pack them up and deliver them to your door with idiot-proof instructions for heating and assembly. Foodies can eat out while staying in, and pretend they’re Heston Blumenthal in the process.
Banks’s team created Made in Oldstead Food Boxes, which contain two three-course meals for two people, for £75. They arrive on a Friday in stylish sustainable packaging, with only some reheating required. Initially, the team delivered them personally in the local area, often finding that houses on the same street had co-ordinated to plan dinner parties over their garden fences.
It’s “minimal work, maximum enjoyment,” Banks says, “which comes down to dish development. There’s things in the restaurant that you’d never take into consideration because you make the food, you put it on the plate and carry it to the customer. Nothing can go wrong. Suddenly,
you’ve got to create a dish which travels, will reheat well, and then you hope that people will open the box up and eat it all straight away but, in reality, some might not eat it for days.”
Quality control is no nonsense: “It sounds crazy, but we pack a box up, turn it upside down, drop it on the floor, boot it from one side of the kitchen to the other, and throw it against a wall. Then we unpack it. That’s the test, every week.”
The enterprise now employs 25 people delivering around 500 boxes a week nationwide, and Banks is keen to develop this arm of the business post-Covid, with an eye on festive boxes and festival appearances — once those are again allowed.
Banks is not alone. Available nationally from lockdown’s earliest days was #pizzainthepost by Pizza Pilgrims: it looks like a takeaway pizza box in the restaurant’s signature green and white stripes, but opens up to reveal individual pots of preproved pizza dough, marinara sauce, fresh Fior di Latte, basil, Parmesan and extra virgin olive oil (£15 for two people). You cook your Neapolitanstyle pizza in a dry frying pan, giving you that satisfyingly charred base, and finish it under the grill. Banks calls it “genius” and Stormzy, no less, is apparently a fan. Sales average 1,500 a week.
“I’d actually tried to get the idea off the ground twice before but failed miserably,” says James Elliott, who started the boutique chain with his brother Thom. They’d discovered the frying pan method years ago, when their wood-fired oven broke during a party, but lockdown provided the key to persuading people to try it.
Nervous cooks can watch a YouTube tutorial of James showing them how it’s done — the same tack employed by Dishoom co-founder
Kavi Thakrar, who demonstrates the Bombay street food chain’s famous bacon naan for recipients of the breakfast kit (which includes an extra batch of dough in case of mishaps).
Elsewhere, you can steam pillowy Taiwanese buns ready to stuff with 12-hour braised pork from London chain Bao, or feast on a pound of prize beef brisket from Shoreditch-based Smokestak, oak-smoked and slow-cooked to perfection.
Sabor en Casa is the at-home iteration of the Michelin-starred restaurant co-founded by Nieves Barragán Mohacho and José Etura in 2018. Customers can choose between three boxes ranging from £58 to £90, each feeding four via a gastronomic tour of Spain. Fractionally more technique is entrusted to diners (like simmering Calasparra rice in squid ink bisque until deep, dark and al dente) and the complex components require fiendishly clever packaging, but the effort on both sides is well worth it.
“We wanted to do it properly,” Mohacho says, “ensuring that our customers could have a true Sabor experience in the comfort of their own homes. We’re completely committed to Sabor en Casa as a permanent extension of the restaurant itself.”
For gastronomes who find themselves shut out of eating out, the benefits of DIY cooking kits are obvious; for restaurants, producing them has been a boon. “Lockdown for anyone in hospitality has been tough,” says Mohacho. “Not just financially, but as chefs and restaurateurs we’re used to such fast-paced environments, something we’ve really missed.”
The boxed kits are also an important way of diversifying revenue so that restaurant businesses are less vulnerable in the future — to lockdowns, social distancing, and whatever else 2020 finds to throw at us. In a way, says Banks, “It’s just remarkable we never did it before.” ○