Two Tampa businesses - Let's Eat and Dinner Done - help busy people prepare meals for their families without having to shop, chop or mop.
By JANET K. KEELER, Times Staff Writer
Published May 11, 2005
[Times photo: Chris Zuppa]
Lisa Wikholm, left, Andrea Wilson and Kippy McCall, all of St. Petersburg, look over a list of the dishes they’ll be assembling at Let’s Eat in Tampa.
For about $200, customers can prepare 12 dishes, mostly entrees, to be taken home and stored in the freezer.
Let’s Eat does the shopping, lays out the food and provides the equipment for its dishes, such as Greek-style Stuffed Peppers.
TAMPA - Lisa Veltman holds a peanut butter pie aloft, like a perky game-show host parading the grand prize before a breathless studio audience.
"I feel like Betty Crocker," Veltman says. She poses with the creamy confection, adoring what she's accomplished.
In less than two hours, Veltman, a stay-at-home mother of two from Largo, may well feel like Julia Child, having made more than a week's worth of dinners, including crab cakes and chicken Parmesan, to feed her family. All will be stored in her home freezer, ready for service.
Veltman is one of eight women at a morning session at Let's Eat, a make-and-take meal preparation business that's capitalizing on Americans' desire to eat at home without actually preparing it there. Dinner Done in Carrollwood offers the same service.
After all, a family can only stomach so much takeout and fast food. Americans are cooking less and less, says the NPD Group, a marketing research company, but they still need to eat. And many want to preserve the tradition of the family dinner.
That's why, NPD's Harry Balzer told the Journal News of suburban New York last month, the make-and-take concept is right on target.
Let's Eat and Dinner Done are two of many food assembly outlets that have sprung up around the country in the past two years. Simply Dinners in Tucson, Ariz., Let's Dish in a Baltimore suburb and Supper Thyme USA, with several locations in the upper Midwest, are some of the others.
The mother of them all is Dream Dinners, which kicked off the trend in Seattle a few years ago and now has 55 stores around the country and expects to open another 25 soon.
Let's Eat will open an outlet in Westchase in July and another in Brandon in the fall. Both Tampa businesses want to expand into Pinellas County.
"You wonder how something so simple could strike such a chord," says Audra Nasser, who owns Dinner Done with her husband, Dan. "But we're drawing customers from Gainesville, Kissimmee, Sarasota, Lakeland, Winter Haven and even Brevard County. Some of them are regulars."
At the session during which Veltman made her peanut butter pie, not one customer was from Tampa.
What you do
For about $200 and two hours, customers assemble 12 dishes, mostly entrees, to be carted home and stored in the freezer. Each dish serves four to six people at $3 to $5 per serving. For eight dishes, the cost is about $150.
The offerings are not necessarily complete meals and need augmentation via vegetables, salad or bread.
Customers register for day or evening, weekday or weekend sessions online or over the phone. Web sites detail what to expect and staffers walk customers through the process before each session. Menus change monthly and usually include a dessert and a kid-friendly meal, such as taco pie or chicken chili.
The beauty of the concept is that the planning, shopping, prep work and clean up is done by someone else. In a time-deprived society, having someone do those chores is worth a lot.
Customers, up to 10, move from station to station, assembling dishes from prepped ingredients. Pans, bowls, measuring spoons and other utensils, even disposable plastic gloves, are at the ready. A recipe is framed and sits at eye level. (Read twice before starting.) Customers bring pans or use complimentary disposable ones. Freezing, thawing and cooking instructions are provided. They are still working to compile nutritional information for each recipe.
"This appeals to me because I can tailor-make meals," Veltman says. Only she knows whether her children will eat mushrooms or diced tomatoes. "And I've got something ready in case I get sick or the kids do. It's a great alternative to ordering pizza."
Leave it to multitasking moms to think of all the ways the prepared meals can be used: on nights of multiple kid activities, for babysitters, when grandma is on duty for the weekend, when a friend has a baby or there's a death or illness in someone's family, when the family cook (mom or dad) is away. Or just because.
"I'm tickled pink because I have eight great meals for backup," Veltman says.
And an idea for a mothers' night out. It's nice to have an alternative to the scrapbooking-pottery painting-braceletmaking gatherings.
Who's doing it
Lisa Wikholm, special events coordinator at St. Petersburg's Shorecrest Preparatory School, is digging the experience. She loves to cook, even caters parties sometimes, but can't carve out time to shop, prep, cook and clean seven nights a week.
As she stacks her meals on a refrigerated shelf that bears her name, she swears she's coming back.
"I just love this," she says.
Let's Eat co-owner Melissa H. Slack says Wikholm is typical of the mostly women who come to assemble meals. Between work and working the baseball concession stand, they struggle to cook nightly meals from scratch.
"It's all about the convenience factor," Slack says. She's the mother of two young children and dropped out of the corporate world before opening Let's Eat.
"I was a stay-at-home mom and I like to cook, and I was still challenged by it," she says.
Nasser of Dinner Done says make-and-take stores help many people accomplish something that's important to them: Gathering family around the dinner table.
"But the cooking kills their whole night," she says.
Plus, she says, a lot of people in their 30s and younger, don't know how to cook. Though the assembly-line preparation is not necessarily a cooking class, many participants pick up something about making a meal.
"It brings variety into the home," Nasser says. "You get a chance to play with ingredients that you may not think of using. And you're not buying a big bag of whatever."
How it tastes
In general, the recipes, which come from cookbooks, the Internet and relatives, are simple, though they do include ingredients such as Gorgonzola cheese and pine nuts. Not necessarily everyday flavors.
The recipes, while not necessarily gourmet, are solid and interesting. More importantly, for home cooks who struggle for ideas, they bring enticing alternatives to the baked chicken-grilled steak-spaghetti rotation. Or worse, the McDonald's-Wendy's-Burger King triumvirate.
Crab cakes were tasty with hunks of claw meat mixed with spicy jalapenos. (Leave those out for milder tastes.) Greek-Style Stuffed Peppers retained crunch which nicely offset soft, tangy feta draped with chunky tomato sauce. Taco pie was, well, kid stuff.
Bourbon Barbecue Salmon was ridiculously simple. Beautiful, slim filets went into a resealable bag with barbecue sauce, bourbon, brown sugar, minced garlic, cumin, salt and pepper. Double bagged and tagged with cooking instructions, it's chilling in the freezer, awaiting the call as a meal to be eaten later. Yes, the recipe is probably readily available on the Internet or in a multitude of cookbooks, and yes, it took less than five minutes to put together.
But for some, Bourbon Barbecue Salmon would require a stop at a liquor store and maybe even the purchase of a $3-plus container of cumin. At that point, pizza delivery sounds like a better alternative.
Not for Lisa Veltman, though. She has Chicken Parmesan and Arroz Con Pollo in the freezer.
