Sunday, March 26,
2000
Restaurant alternative:
Personal chef
Meals ready to heat, eat
at home
BY
JENNY CALLISON
Enquirer contributor
Leigh Ochs has a suggestion for folks who
love good food but are too busy to cook: Give restaurants a rest and
consider a personal chef service.
Mrs. Ochs' new venture, Custom Cuisine,
offers the premise that busy people can eat well and enjoy meals with
family and friends, if they will leave the planning, preparation and
cleanup to her.
When prospective clients call, Mrs. Ochs
begins by interviewing them about their food preferences and allergies.
They then select from her seasonal menu, making adjustments and
substitutions to suit their palates. With the order complete, she makes
a date with the client's kitchen, packs up the necessary equipment and
utensils in her portable pantry and goes grocery shopping.
|
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS |
Leigh Ochs plans to change her menu choices every
three to four months, allowing Custom Cuisine to offer seasonal
specialties. Her basic chef service costs $325 and provides five
meals for four people or 10 meals for two. She can also package
that amount of food to serve 20 meals for a shut-in.
Each meal consists of a main dish, a starch and a vegetable.
Special diets can be accommodated.
“It's all fresh,”
she said. “Nothing is frozen before I prepare it.”
Custom Cuisine is on the web at www.personalchef.com/custom_cuisine.htm.
The e-mail address is CstCuisine@aol.com; telephone
is (513) 469-6874. |
When Mrs. Ochs shows up at a client's home, she's ready to cook.
“I use their counter tops, their sink,
their stove and refrigerator,” she said. “I cook the food there and
package it there. Most meals I package for the freezer, and leave
thawing and heating instructions. When I'm finished, the kitchen is just
as the client left it.”
Except, of course, for the lingering
aromas.
Since her startup in December, Mrs. Ochs
has been surprised by her customers and their tastes.
“I thought I'd get a lot of husbands and
wives, but I've cooked for more families than couples or singles,” she
said. “And they order simple, homey things: roast chicken as opposed to
cornish game hen, for instance. Meatloaf, beef stroganoff.”
“My children are so animated when we have
one of Leigh's meals,” Marifran Dirkes said. Mrs. Dirkes signed up for
Custom Cuisine's service to ease dinner preparation woes while she
completed a book project. Her husband, Bill, is an anesthetist.
“Leigh is very professional in the way
she presents the information,” Mrs. Dirkes said. “The questionnaire
about our food interests and allergies, as well as the menus, was a
great starting point. And she's willing to be flexible.”
Mrs. Dirkes explained that her three
children can be picky about vegetables, but they've raved about Custom
Cuisine's carrot souffle.
“They eat it like it's a dessert, but
meanwhile, they're getting all those vitamins,” Mrs. Dirkes said.
Each food item is labeled and stored for
freezing either in a vacuum-sealed bag or in a plastic freezer
container. Before vanishing from the kitchen, Mrs. Ochs leaves
instructions for optimal reheating of each dish.
Some clients have engaged Mrs. Ochs'
services not for themselves, but for others. New mothers, people
recovering from surgery or illness and elderly parents have received
Custom Cuisine gift certificates.
Cooking professionally represents a
career switch for Mrs. Ochs, who was a social worker and part owner in a
home health-care business until December.
“Medicare was making a lot of cuts, so we
decided to close the business,” she said. “I had always wanted to cook,
although I wasn't interested in the restaurant or catering businesses.”
One of her partners drew Mrs. Ochs'
attention to an article in Entrepreneur magazine that identified
the personal chef business as one of the 12 hottest ventures in 1999.
“I joined the American Personal Chef
Association and got information and materials from them in October,” she
said. “I cooked for my first clients in December.”
Whipping together an enterprise in two
months required a blend of creative and organizational abilities.
Fortunately, the cooking part came
easily. Mrs. Ochs loves to cook and has entertained frequently for her
husband. He, in turn, has treated her each year to a week at LaVarenne
Cooking School, at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. At LaVarenne,
Ms. Ochs has studied everything from soup to nuts with some of the
world's foremost culinary instructors, including Julia Child.
When she began to organize, Mrs. Ochs
converted a room in her Symmes Township home to an office and storeroom.
She consulted her myriad cookbooks for menu ideas and designed a logo
and printed materials.
Because she would be doing all of her
professional cooking in other peoples' homes, Mrs. Ochs had to engineer
a lightweight carry-all kitchen. Its three components are a large,
multi-pocket duffel bag, a tall plastic basket and a three-tiered
plastic bin on wheels. Into these go storage containers, labels and
vacuum sealer, cleanup supplies, pots and pans, utensils and seasonings.
She shops the day before an assignment and transports perishables in a
lightweight cooler.
Although business is heating up, Mrs.
Ochs is still reaching out to potential customers.
“My customers so far have come from
word-of-mouth.” she said. “The biggest challenge is getting the word out
and having people understand what the service entails and what it costs.
After they've had it, they appreciate it.”
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