By Nikki Griffiths
South West London has a new takeaway option that’s good for you. Supper was founded in 2014 by CEO Duncan Scott whose mission is to “give more people the opportunity to eat healthy, good quality and freshly home-cooked food with the convenience of it being delivered to the door, hot and ready to enjoy”. Essentially it means you can have a home-cooked dinner, even if you don’t have the time or inclination to make it yourself.
What really sets Supper apart is that the team has put a huge amount of work into the nutritional aspect, even hiring a Harley Street nutritionist. Each option has a full nutritional breakdown and dishes are clearly marked with badges such as ‘vegetarian’, ‘low sugar’ and ‘under 500 calories’, so it’s easy for those with dietary requirements to find something suitable.
I can see how this service could be well received by a lot of people – those who work late but don’t want to resort to KFC, mums too busy to cook but wanting to make sure the kids get a wholesome dinner, and even for a romantic night in when you’ve got better things to be doing than cooking.
Behind the scenes, Supper is made up of a network of professional and amateur chefs and delivery drivers. Each morning, the chefs who want to cook that day just log into their chef app and choose which dishes from their repertoire they’ll cook. And once an order is made, it’s paired with a delivery driver.
For the hungry consumer the process begins with downloading their app. Once you’ve done that and set up your profile, load up the app from midday on the day you want your supper delivering to scroll through your dinner options. Just remember that it’s first come, first served and there’s a finite number of orders each chef can take, since they’re usually cooking without the aid of a professional kitchen. The Supper team advises that new chefs are joining constantly, each bringing their own influences and recipes and meaning the menu is ever-evolving.
The dish I picked was chimichurri chicken and Peruvian mash, priced at £15 for an individual but with discounts if buying for two, up to the maximum of eight. This dish also displayed the ‘low cal’, ‘low fat’ and ‘low sugar’ badges, meaning I was definitely sticking to my diet – not something that usually happens when ordering takeaway. The dish was made by chef Gastro Latina who has lived in both Argentina and Spain – clearly an influence on her cooking.
The first thing to note was that the delivery was made on the dot, by a very smiley gent. The packaging was all brown paper and card – much more tasteful than the typical silver cartons. And there was even a hand-written note on the bag.
Inside there were two large chicken breasts, mashed potato cakes (including some made from purple potatoes), sautéed plantain, wilted spinach and chimichurri sauce. If I’m honest, I’d been fairly dubious about travelling chicken breast. But it was still as juicy and succulent as if it had just been cooked. What’s more, everything was still warm.
The mash was OK, though I couldn’t taste the Peruvian yellow pepper which the description says it’s flavoured with. On the other hand, the plantain was perfectly sautéed and avoided the usual gripes I have with it – too sweet, too sticky, too mushy. Actually, this renewed my liking for the stuff.
What really made this dish was the zingy, herby and down-right delicious chimichurri sauce. Gastro Latina, if you read this, you should find a way to bottle that stuff and sell it on!
Reflecting on Supper and its place in the market, I think it will divide opinions. As a lover of cooking I find it hard to think of a time when I wouldn’t either want to cook, go out for dinner, or eat a takeaway I knew was bad for me. Although, I do still have the app. On the other hand I can see that it has filled a gap in the market, and that it will make life that little bit easier (and certainly healthier) for people who use it. Having conducted a straw poll amongst friends, it seems that there are a lot of people who would jump at the chance of eating healthy, home-cooked food whilst avoiding cooking and washing up.
What I can say with confidence is that the ethos of Supper is admirable and it’s nice to see someone doing things a little differently. Good luck to them.
Brixton Blog were guests of Supper but this post reflects the author’s own views and was not sponsored.
