Family dinner: It's everywhere, and it's going to save us

Drop-off meals are the delicious, nurturing answer to so many of life's (and the restaurant industry's) problems.

Sheet-pan Chicken with Carrots, Turnips and Harissa (from a Cooks Without Borders recipe) makes a delightful drop-off dinner. / Photo by Leslie Brenner

Last week, my friend Olivia Lopez — an extremely enterprising and talented young chef and budding restaurateur — packed up a Mexican dinner for four and brought it over to our townhouse. Olivia wanted to feed us because I’m mourning the passing of a beloved family member.

The feast, which starred tacos, included heritage pork carnitas; oyster mushrooms with potatoes; incredible tortillas made from Mexican heirloom corn Olivia nixtamalizes and grinds into masa; frijoles de olla made with bayo beans; and an array of incredible salsas, including one meant for the mushroom tacos that featured Brazilian starfish peppers grown on her partner Jonathan’s Pequeño Farms.

They had packed the carnitas, mushrooms and beans in those foil pans you can reheat in the oven (which we did), and the salsas in small plastic tubs. It was so easy to reheat everything — the tortillas in one of those micro-waveable pouches — and everything was fabulous. (The carnitas were probably the best I’ve ever had!) Best of all, Olivia and Jonathan stayed to enjoy it all with us.

Whether with actual or chosen family, communing at the table over great food brings us closer and soothes us as a society — which feels essential in these precarious times. Since cavemen and cavewomen first started having cavebabies, gathering around the table at the end of the day to connect over food has been what has kept families together and united friends the world over.

People in the hospitality business know that; that’s why good restaurant employers offer their staff what’s known in the industry as “family meal.” Eating together before a shift helps employees bond as a team, and being fed lets them feel nurtured.

Hey, wait — that gives us an idea!

Packing up and selling family meals — usually sized for four — is also the way many restaurants have stayed afloat through the pandemic. It’s the basis of a lean business model for chefs and others creating their own innovative food businesses (yep, that’s what Olivia is doing). And it’s something home cooks can offer to friends or family members in need of drop-off sustenance.

It’s an idea whose time has come — and suddenly it feels like that family meal lightbulb is flashing over heads everywhere.

How zeitgeisty is it? Yesterday, as I was diving into writing this missive, another chef-friend — Keith Cedotal — stopped by to drop off a box of breakfast pastries, a quiche, a tub of pimento cheese and baguette chips from his new “bake-araunt” Keesh.

Keesh chef and owner Keith Cedotal with a mushroom-and-kale keesh / Photo by Leslie Benner

Both Olivia and Keith are in the process of launching restaurants meant one day to be brick-and-mortar locations; both are getting off the ground by offering drop-off catering.

It’s a scenario playing out in cities all over the U.S. — chefs and others are starting food business with little more than an Instagram account, access to a commercial kitchen, some to-go packaging and their car. “You’ve just gotta do it!” says Keith. (Olivia’s business is Molino Olōyō.)

How the trend took off

The recent explosion of drop-off catering and other family-style to-go offerings has its roots, of course, in the early days of the pandemic. With dining rooms forced to close, restaurants whose food didn’t travel particularly well, or who were being killed by the fees they were paying third-party delivery services for single-portion meals, started offering kits to recreate their popular dishes, or created new offerings designed to be served family-style.

Lucia — one of Dallas’ most renowned and outstanding restaurants — survived by selling what co-owner Jennifer Ugyur calls “meal for four.”

“That dish of handmade tagliatelle that’s so beautiful in the restaurant,” she explains, would be a flop by the time it arrived at your home. “We were never gonna make it if we were going to sell meatball subs,” so instead they started offering lasagna for four. It may not be as nuanced and composed as what you’d enjoy in Lucia’s dining room, she says, “but it’s delicious.” (She made the remarks as a panelist in a “Resilient Hospitality” conversation last week that was part of the annual retreat of the Dallas Summit.)

Now that dining rooms are open again, the revenue stream the meals for four creates continues to help Lucia survive.

Pre-pandemic, consumers had become more and more dependent on having meals delivered by third-party services like Grub Hub or Door Dash. But because of delivery fees that cut too deeply into their meager-if-existent-at-all profits, that wasn’t a survival solution for many restaurants, as a story in Eater explained about a year into Covid.

Meanwhile, people who really care about food noticed that dishes designed to be served immediately in a dining room often didn’t travel well. Family-style meals designed to be reheated — that could come with separate garnishes and include instructions on how to reheat and how to serve — were much more satisfying.

A Lamb Barbacoa dinner for four from Molino Olōyō. Chef and co-owner Olivia Lopez sold it pre-order on Instagram during the holidays, and then for a Super Bowl meal pick-up pop-up. / Photo by Leslie Brenner

Now I have no statistics to back this up — my evidence is personal and anecdotal — but my sense is that there is a growing demand for these kind of meals, even though people can (for now, anyway) dine more safely in restaurants. I was just in L.A. staying at the home of a friend who picked up family-style food for a brunch she hosted on a Sunday morning. She then picked up family-style food for a dinner she hosted for friends on Monday night. In the past, she told me, she probably would have had one of the two events inside a restaurant.

More love for staying in

I think many people have re-set their dining habits during Covid. Those who used to dine out most nights of the week might now prefer eating out once or twice, and staying home other nights. But that doesn’t mean they necessarily want to cook five or six nights. The answer: order a drop-off family dinner!

My theory is supported by the explosive growth of a drop-off meal business, also here in Dallas, called À Table. Founder Josephine Giesen launched it 14 months before COVID, in November 2018, as a means of “Bringing the family back to the dinner table,” as its website announces. A few months into the pandemic, Josephine hired my consulting business, Leslie Brenner Concepts, to help her evolve it. À Table enjoyed steady 40% growth from launch to February 2021, and then the growth exploded: Business doubled from February 2021 to February 2022, Josephine tells me.

For fledgling restaurateurs, launching with drop-off catering has so many benefits: It’s a lean business model that allows them to dive in with much less of an investment than opening a physical restaurant requires. It lets them establish their brand, and organically build a following. Happy clients, who will continue ordering, will also become a pool of eager physical restaurant guests. Once the physical restaurant is open, the drop-off catering arm becomes an excellent revenue stream.

Concerned food-loving citizens often ask me how they can best support restaurants, which continue to struggle mightily for their survival. Frequenting dining rooms early in the week rather than a Friday or Saturday night and reserving tables earlier or later than prime 7 or 7:30 dinner time are two ways. What if you don’t want to go out for dinner mid-week, but also don’t want to cook every single night? You can support your favorite restaurants by putting their drop-off (or pick-up) family meals in your rotation.

But wait — I love to cook!

Of course you do. I do, too.

Here’s an idea: Orchestrate a Personal Pop-up. Even if you’re not a chef like Olivia or Keith, you can put together a family meal to bring to a friend’s. What a great way to re-bond after a lonely pandemic. Or drop off dinner for four for an ailing friend or an elderly relative — or even gift to a pal with a busy work life.

Doing that wouldn’t even necessarily mean spending extra hours in the kitchen. Next time you make a sheet pan dinner, or a big pot of something braised, or a batch of enchiladas, just double the amounts, pack up one dinner’s worth in reheatable foil pans (or a pot you don’t mind loaning the friend). Drop it off. You’re now a hero who has made someone very, very happy.

What to make to deliver, and how do you manage it? I just published a how-to story at Cooks Without Borders, complete with recipes that will travel and re-heat well.

I’d love to know your thoughts (we all would!). Do you have an idea for a one-pan dinner that travels and re-heats well? Or are you a chef starting a business by offering this kind of drop-off or pick-up catering? Tell us about it in a comment (maybe you’ll pick up some clients along the way)!

Do you like what you’ve read here? Please share this post.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you by a friend? Grab your own free subscription!

Have a great week, everyone. Next time I’ll share some readings.

🐞