Taste Test: Kitchen Show's Cook-at-Home Gourmet Meals for Two Really Deliver

I love to cook, but working as an office hack means that by the time I fight my way through the subway in the evening, just about the last thing I want to do is fight more crowds to shop for fresh produce, bring it all home, and fire up dinner from scratch.

As a consequence, I’ve been known to order Annie’s on consecutive nights for weeks on end ... not good for the wallet nor the waistline.

So I looked at the arrival of cook-at-home meal delivery service Kitchen Show with anticipation … and yet also a little trepidation: pre-portioned and packaged ingredients, delivered to your home, and cooked in a under a half an hour? Sounds too good to be true.

Kitchen Show's pictures made each meal look fantastic, but you know how that goes: what looks good prepared by a chef and photographed by a professional could be a major disappointment when cooked up in your own hovel.

So I set out to give this service a whirl. I ordered two kits and cooked them under actual conditions. The Ethiopian Berbere Chicken Legs with Green Beans and Parsley-Lime Couscous sounded yummy, was reasonably priced at RMB 88, and required only 30 minutes of prep time. Deal.

There are several items that need to work in order for Kitchen Show to be a viable choice for dinner, and I've graded the service on a 10-point scale, with a maximum of 2 points for each item:

1. Is it easy to order? (1 point)
2. Is the produce fresh and safe? (2 points)
3. Can it be cooked by a culinary moron such as myself? (2 points)
4. Are the instructions clear? (1.5 points)
5. Does it taste good? (1.5 points)

In short, Kitchen Show passes with a score of 8/10, with some reservations. Let me address each, point by point:

1. Is it easy to order?
Yes and no. First off, the English version is in WeChat only, so if you’re not using WeChat, then you’re out of luck (you would also be well advised to crawl out from under the the rock you’ve been living under up until this point in time).

Kudos for having all the recipes and orders in English and allowing for cash on delivery for those laowai that can’t get their WeChat payment system hooked up.

However, in order to complete the order, one does have to go through WeChat’s Chinese-only ordering system, which can be a bit daunting (though Kitchen Show does have a handy post that details how to do it with English captioning).

So presuming you are reasonably intelligent and patient (or have a Chinese friend/co-worker/significant other to help), this is easy to overcome.

Another kink, and perhaps a more critical one, is that you have to order your meal a day in advance. I tend to think about tonight’s dinner at about 5pm when my stomach starts grumbling. If I was organized enough to think about tomorrow night’s dinner today, I probably wouldn’t need this kit. Hopefully once Kitchen Show ramps up their volume they will be able to fulfill same-day deliveries.

2. Is the produce fresh / safe?
This is the biggie. It takes a lot of faith to allow someone else to pick out your meat and produce. After all, who trusts a stranger to thump your melons?

The set I ordered had deboned chicken legs, fresh green beans, a carrot, parsley, an onion, a lime and two cloves of peeled garlic. All arrived neatly packaged, unblemished and firm.

I was particularly impressed with the beans the parsley, both fresher than the ones I typically see in my neighborhood vegetable market.  

The chicken was well prepared, carefully deboned, and well packaged in a leak-proof vacuum bag.

As for safety, It’s hard to tell, but everything that came in the Kitchen Show looked both fresh and sanitary, and each was carefully labeled in English and Chinese. Perishables were marked with the date of packing.

Most importantly I’ve made and consumed Kitchen Show meals on two consecutive evenings, and I and my family have passed the morning-after laduzi test.

3. Can it be cooked by a culinary moron such as myself?
Definitely yes. Virtually everything you need, right down to the salt, pepper and cooking oil – are pre-portioned and supplied. No need to supplement with anything. The chicken leg comes deboned (I’m definitely not deboning a chicken leg on my own). In fact, the whole meal can be made in one pan. You do own a pan, don’t you?

My eight-year-old daughter helped as well, and frankly could have probably done it herself if I wasn’t so much of a helicopter parent to not let her do all the veggie chopping.

And unlike some recipes I've come across, this one really only took the 30 minutes it says it takes on the package.

4. Are the instructions clear?
The instructions are in fluent English, and listed step-by-step with photos. It would be genuinely difficult to screw this up, and no fancy techniques were called for.

There were a few ambiguities along the way: For instance, I tended to use all of the pre-portioned items in one go, which meant I dumped a little too much salt on at the beginning, and using the whole onion and carrot that were supplied overcrowded my pan.

I only had one major issue with the recipe: tossing a bouillon cube into the pan is called for at one point, and I knew from previous experience that if I didn’t first dissolve the cube in hot water, I’d probably end up with lumps of bouillon somewhere in the finished dish.

My couscous turned out mushy using the recommended 500ml of water, so on the second time around I cut it to 400ml and it came out perfect.

Finally, possibly due to an overabundance of carrots and onion, my finished dish ended up with very little sauce, which I remedied easily by adding more water and deglazing the pan at the end.

5. Does it taste good?
It was in fact quite tasty, and mild enough so that even my 8-year-old, who hates spicy food, wanted more.

As to its authenticity, I’d be hard-pressed to say that this dish is anything like anything I’ve had at the dozen or so visits to Ethiopian restaurants I’ve made – so no extra credit for authenticity.  

This probably has to do with the fact that Berbere spice packet was mostly paprika. It was missing both the kick and the unique fragrance of this common Ethiopian spice, which is a complex mixture of things like cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, turmeric, fenugreek and ginger.

I checked with Kitchen Show to make sure I wasn’t given the wrong spice packet – they relayed to me that there was indeed some of those spices in the packet, but they had reduced the level of the less familiar spices to suit local tastes.

That aside, the dish was delicious. 

I can’t see making Kitchen Show a daily habit, but probably the most pleasing thing for me was the fact that the pre-portioning meant that I didn’t have leftover items to toss back into the fridge and go bad.

There’s six menus on offer currently at Kitchen Show. In addition to the recipe I tried, there’s Cajun Prawns, Honey Mustard Chicken, Thai-style Duck, Coconut Green Curry Sole and Australian Sirloin, ranging in price from RMB 88 to RMB 148. All are designed to feed two.

I fully expect to hear it in the comments about how any fool could cook this dish on their own without needing to purchase one of these kits. It's true -- you definitely can -- but I see real value in this as a once-in-a-while treat that saves a significant amount of time and trouble, and allows me to enjoy cooking on a workday without the need for a lot of pre-coordination.

You can reach Kitchen Show's English WeChat Account by scanning the QR code below: