Emulate Your Favorite Restaurant With These Assemble-at-Home Cooking Kits
Inspired by people's growing hunger for cooking, which was in turn driven by their inability to leave the house for a proper meal, several of Beijing's restaurants have seized the opportunity to deliver selected menu items as deconstructed kits to assemble at home.
There are a couple of benefits to this: one, you get to pretend you're making a slap-up meal without spending hours in the kitchen and two, the food tastes fresher than it would had it been carted half the way across the city. Unfortunately, excessive packaging, as with regular waimai, still remains a problem but vendors of these assemble-at-home meals are wising up to that issue by providing containers that are hardy and reusable where possible.
Café Flo
With their Flo Spoon range, Café Flo has created several meal kits that are so brimming with ingredients and dishes that your captive audience won't care that you've just assembled it out of a box. Several options are available depending on the occasion, including a brunch set (avocado and smoked salmon salad, bacon and sausages, mushroom soup and black truffle cream, orange juice), an oriental set (Thai beef salad, spicy chicken wings, braised pork rib soup), and a deluxe set (New Zealand rib-eye steak, black truffle french fries, creme brulee, and much more, pictured above), each with their own assembly instructions, making it easier than ever to play head chef in your own kitchen. For a limited time, you'll also receive a free bottle of house wine when you spend over RMB 398.
Scan the QR code in the poster above to access the Flo Spoon mini-program.
Tiago
Tiago's Easy to Go embody a more dialed-back approach, offering individual dishes that wouldn't be out of place on a regular weeknight menu at home, such as pizzas, curry, and meatballs, as well as a couple of fancier numbers such as beef wellington, ribs, and paella. They also have rotating sets and discounts, which currently include a parma ham pizza and two bottles of Jing-A beer for RMB 98 or a buy three get one free dessert set down from RMB 232 to RMB 138. Each of the ingredients is clearly labeled and accompanied by a set of simple cooking instructions.
Scan the QR code in the poster above to access Tiago's mini-program.
The Hutong
Having long conducted in-house cooking workshops, The Hutong are no strangers to preparing fresh ingredients for authentic Chinese grub. Simply choose which dishes you'd like to cook, order, and have the pre-measured ingredients delivered to your door so all you need to do is follow the instructions and get cooking. Do it once, and you should have everything you need to master classics like malaxiangguo, dapanji, Yunnan heisanduo, and Wuhan reganmian. Vegetarian options are also available.
Zhazha Bistro
In addition to their regular waimai menu, Qianmen's Zhazha Bistro has also packaged their mouthwatering Guizhou-style noodles and side dishes (chicken wings, pig's feet, spicy sausage, assorted vegetables, etc.) for delivery. The noodles are as simple to assemble as heating the broth, cooking the noodles, and throwing it all together in a bowl.
READ: The Hutong's Quarantine Cook-Off, Final Round: Wuhan Hot-Dry Noodles
Images courtesy of the vendors
