Take middle road for fresh restaurant meal
Local restaurants offer prepped meals you can make at home
Local dining establishments offer prepared kits you can assemble, complete and eat at home.
Since the lockdown began, dinner — for most of us — has fallen into one of two baskets. ● There are the dishes we prepare at home, whether they be scratch-cooked with love or prepared from origins ... less ambitious. ● Then there are restaurant dishes, which we see through the foggy window of carryout and delivery — boxed and transported with varying degrees of success, more an aspirational reminder of what it was like to eat in our favorite dining rooms than a portable recreation of the experience. ● Put another way, unless you’re walking away from the pickup counter and immediately dropping down the tailgate to dine al trunko, restaurant food just isn’t the same when it isn’t freshly cooked. ● But what if you do the cooking yourself?
Bianco’s father, Leonard. But in the meantime, Tratto is offering fresh pasta by the pound for carryout along with a handful of fresh sauces, including tomato passata, meaty Bolognese, pesto and Tratto’s beloved cacio e pepe. (Shortino confesses that the to-go version of “cacio e pepe” is actually a fonduta, as though a fonduta ever requires an apology or an explanation.)
Aric Mei has converted The Parlor’s dining room into a local products minimarket, but by popular demand, in addition to pasta and sauces, he’s started offering DIY pizza kits including dough, tomato sauce, cheese, Schreiner’s pepperoni and fresh basil, ready for rolling, topping and baking at home. But he wouldn’t dare send you home without
Details: $12 pizza kit, $7 cookie dough. 1916 E. Camelback Road, Phoenix. 602-248-2480, theparlor.us.