What’s cooking Chef?
In a US press release that just dropped, is an item about The Chef Project. Its subject must be a few weeks old but was new to me.
The release describes it like this – “The Chef Project came about after its Founder, Australian Steven Pharr, became frustrated with his own cycle. “I had a routine of about 8 meals I would cook, they revolved over time, but were just different versions of the same base 8 recipes. I would try to find new recipes in magazines, but they were just the same, a different pasta sauce, a different sort of pie. It had got very boring.” said Pharr. “I know I am not only in this situation.”
“Yet as soon as I moved away from recipes I found in magazines and on the internet, to more interesting recipes from different cultures I found it was too difficult to source ingredients, the ingredients were too expensive, the meal was too unhealthy to consume regularly, or the dish required abilities that exceeded my skills. It was from this reality that The Chef Project was borne,” said Pharr. His idea is to provide you with weekly recipe stimulation via email, but it’s stimulation from ten International celebrity chefs.
It costs $80 USD* a year (not as good a deal this week as it was last!) which is about what a premium cookbook costs. Apparently you get three recipes a week for fifty weeks, one Entree, one Main Course and one Dessert. That’s fifteen recipes each from the ten chefs, 150 recipes in total. I assume they’re also stored on the website. And the only thing lacking is any way to judge what you’re buying – the website sample is a small graphic of an email.You’d just have to trust that the quality of the production is as good as the Chef’s involved.
The Ten Grand Chefs are below, with links to their best known restaurants. A few of those names I knew, I had to look up the others (don’t laugh if you’re a celebrity chef afficionado).
- Jacques Reymond (Australia)
- Grant Achatz (USA)
- Georges Blanc (France)
- Yoshihiro Narisawa (Japan)
- Andoni Luis Aduriz (Spain)
- Carlo Cracco (Italy)
- Pierre Gagnaire (France)
- Martin Berasategui (Spain)
- Alvin Leung (Hong Kong)
- Fergus Henderson (UK)
If you’re into food websites, that’s as good a list as any if you’re looking for design ideas.
The Chef Project website is simple and attractive itself.
While it come across, and is introduced as a personal “I just had this good idea” site, the founder of the Chef project Stephen Pharr is no amateur entrepreneur. There’s a Facebook page which looks like it’s alive, with quick responses to posts, but any social media has the two way relationship and there’s a couple of posts that point out that there’s no way to contact them by email as there’s no email address for the Chef Project on its website, and that Groupon have obviously done a coupon of the day cut price deal already.
Pharr must have worked with Melbournian Jacques Reymond on the concept, as he says “I must also take this opportunity to personally thank Australian Grand Chef Jacques Reymond and his wife Kathy for their endless help in bringing The Chef Project to life. They believed in my vision and offered extraordinary help and guidance from the very beginning, without them The Chef Project would not have been possible”.
As an online business idea The Chefs Project looks good, and if you need a celebrity chef to prompt you each week to try new food ideas, it should give you just that.
(*There would be some PayPal and bank charges for the periodical payments as well)
Just announced is The Chef Project, a new subscription recipe site but with 10 international chefs supplying them weekly.