the times Saturday December 4 2021We e ke n d 5
PETER TARRY FOR THE TIMESexplains. So far Yhangry just operates in
London, but there are plans to roll out
into other cities next year.
Unlike more luxurious private chef
services such as ASL Celebrity Chefs,
which has talent such as Tom Kerridge
on its books and prices from £4,000 for
the evening, this is more family cooking
than fine dining. Yhangry’s most popular
spread is La Fiesta Mexicana. “We’ve
found our customers want a more
relaxed style of eating, dishes that can
be shared,” Zhang says.
There are more than 200 chefs on
Yhangry’s books. While they’re all
“vetted” and have to pass a cooking trial
before being hired, they come from
a range of backgrounds. Bywater used
to be the head of food on Disney Cruise
Lines. If you find a chef you like, you can
request to have them cook for you again.
If you’re a first-timer, I’d recommend
reading some of the reviews first.
Back in my kitchen, the house smells
of Christmas. The glazed ham is roasting
in the oven and Bywater is bringing out
the starters, all of which he assures me is
part of the service.
If, like me, you love to host, Yhangry
is ideal. When someone else is taking
care of everything behind the scenes,
your only task is to entertain. Which,
I discover, takes some pacing. Wine
bottles get drained very quickly when
the only job you have is to keep pouring
them. It also takes some getting used
to. I’m itching to help. But other than
accepting my offer to carry the roast
potatoes and sprouts out for the main
course, Bywater refuses every offer to
sous-chef.
Without a doubt the worst part of
hosting is the rubble that’s left in the
kitchen when it’s all over: wine bottles,
dirty plates, soggy napkins and cutlery.
It is the part I dread most. But once
we’ve finished dessert — a delicious,
extra-boozy-by-request trifle — my
kitchen is spotless.
Would I use Yhangry again? Part of
the fun of a dinner party is deciding
what to eat, the culinary brag, the recipe
one-upmanship, impressing your friends
with the spread you’ve put on. But who
said that means you’ve got to be the one
cooking it?cured meats, including jamon iberico with
marinated figs. For the main course, an
aged rib of beef (which arrives ready to be
roasted) comes with sides including roast
potatoes, truffled cauliflower cheese,
sprouts with iberico ham and a rich bone
marrow gravy — all require simple reheat-
ing. The pudding is choux buns (which are
premade but need to be filled with spoon-
fuls of crème pâtissière and drizzled with
chocolate sauce) and there is a cheese
course with truffle honey and quince jelly.
Order by December 10 for delivery on
December 23; aktarathome.co.ukGauthier vegan box
six courses for four, £150
A Christmas Day box from the vegan fine-
dining restaurant Gauthier in Soho,
London, that includes a trio of “faux gras”,
one with truffles and one with port, as well
as vegan caviar made from kelp, and a tim-
bale (a large, pie-style dish) with root vege-
tables. The main course is a wild mush-
room Wellington (which arrives ready to
pop in the oven). The dessert is a Christ-
mas pudding with brandy plant cream.
Order by December 22 for delivery on
December 23; gauthierhome.co.ukBocca di Lupo
three courses for two, £65
Jacob Kenedy gives this box a distinctly
Italian flavour. The starter is agnolotti dal
plin, tiny pasta parcels filled with beef, fol-
lowed by whole partridge with polenta.
The birds are stuffed and need to be pan-
fried before being cooked in the oven. The
polenta needs to be warmed in a pan, with
parmesan and butter. Pudding is a ready-
to-serve, silky grappa panna cotta.
Order by 9am December 21 for delivery
on December 22; boccadilupo.co.ukHoppers
three courses for two, £60
This Sri Lankan meal kit comes with two
starters — mutton rolls with hot dipping
sauce (which need to be fried) and chicken
kalupol (a spice mix made with toasted
coconut and chillies) finished with crispy
fried ginger. The main course is a rich lamb
shank curry with an aubergine moju salad.
It all just needs to be reheated on the hob.
The pudding is “love cake”, a traditional
semolina cake served in Sri Lanka on spe-
cial occasions, but with dried fruits and
peel to give it the flavour of mince pies. You
can also order for four, for £115.
Order by December 17 for delivery on
December 23; dishpatch.co.ukParsons
four courses for two, £90
The Christmas meal from this celebrated
fish restaurant in central London starts
with canapés of Severn and Wye smoked
cod roe on seaweed crackers, followed by
Scottish scallops (which need to be baked
in the oven for about 10 min) with a sea-
weed crumb. The main course is sea trout
en croûte (which arrives ready to put in the
oven) with a native lobster bisque and
potatoes (which need to be fried). Pudding
is a poached pear tart with spiced chantilly
cream and gingerbread crumble. You can
also order the meal for four, for £165.
Order by December 17 for delivery on
December 23; dishpatch.co.uk
By Harriet AddisonThe meal
was delicious
and hit the
right balance
between effort
and reward
meal kits
I hired a chef for my dinner party
(he’ll come on Christmas Day too for £300)
W
e’ve all been
there: toiling
away in a stuffy
kitchen while
dinner-party
guests chatter
away in the living
room. There are limp offers of help, but
ultimately no one really comes to your
house to do the cooking.
So what if there were a service that
promised to take away the stress as well
as the strange sense of fomo you can get
while your guests enjoy your hospitality?
Yhangry is the name of a new dial-a-
chef service that aims to change the way
we do dinner parties by offering a private
chef service at an affordable price —
from £17 a head. The team of party
planners organise the whole event:
the menu, the big shop, the prep, the
cooking and even the cleaning up.
“We want to be the Deliveroo of the
personal chef world,” says Heinin Zhang,
the creative director at Yhangry. You
may recognise the name. Zhang and
co-founder Siddhi Mittal, both former
City traders, took their idea on to
Dragons’ Den in May. Their pitch won
them an offer of £100,000 in funding
from Peter Jones and Tej Lalvani.
Off screen they later turned down the
Dragons’ offer — “They didn’t have the
connections we initially thought,” Zhang
says — and ended up raising $1.5 million
through seed funding instead.
Yhangry, its founders hope, will be
the next big thing on the dinner party
circuit. A quick, easy and cheap way to
have a private chef cook for you and
your friends at home. All you have to
do is choose a time and date, how many
guests you’d like (up to 40), pick a set
menu (29 available, from Italian fish
feasts at £32 a head to Middle Eastern
spreads at £17 a head) and decide when
you want the chef to leave, either whenthe mains are ready or once dessert has
finished and the washing-up has been
done. There’s the option to add booze,
with wine boxes (from £34) and pre-
mixed cocktails. They have a murder-
mystery game you can add (from £6 per
person) and you can rent a tablescape of
flowers, place settings and candles from
the florist Bloom.
In my kitchen is Mark Bywater, the
head chef at Yhangry, who is cooking
a three-course Christmas blowout for six.
You can even book this for Christmas
Day, although there is a minimum spend
of £300 (usually it’s a minimum of two
guests). He arrives at my flat three hours
before my guests, wearing chef whites
and carrying a satchel of knives.
Working solo, he’s taking over my
kitchen for six hours, where he’ll cook
beetroot gravadlax on rye and brie and
cranberry parcels, and a honey and
mustard-glazed gammon with all the
trimmings, rounded off with trifle.
Even though my pots range from a
battered Tefal frying pan to a Le Creuset
casserole dish, Bywater, who has been
a chef for more than 15 years, is unfazed
by cooking in my kitchen.
“The menu and dishes have all been
adapted so that they can be prepared in
kitchens of every standard,” he explains
diplomatically. Among the ingredients,
delivered to my flat by Waitrose the day
before are ready-to-roll pastry for the
brie parcels and ready-to-pour vanilla
custard for the trifle. Anything that was
missing was zipped over via the grocery
delivery company Gorillas. “We want to
keep the standards high but the cooking
times low,” Bywater says.
This also keeps the costs low. The
dinner for six that we’ll be sitting down
to is one of Yhangry’s more extravagant
menus and costs £300, which works out
at about £50 a head.
Staff shortages mean few London
restaurants are firing on all cylinders, so
most chefs signed up to Yhangry also
work in restaurants. Just like Uber, local
chefs will see a job posted in their area
and can choose to accept it. “It’s a lot
easier for chefs to pick up shifts because
we’ve taken a lot of the time-consuming
elements — the menu development,
the food shop — out of the job,” ZhangKATIE WILSON FOR THE TIMESTony Turnbull testing
the festive meal kitsChef Mark Bywater with Hannah Evans
(standing, right) and her guestsHannah Evans
tries out the new
dial-a-chef service