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.
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RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
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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.
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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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