Gay DeMichele adds education, inspiration to meal preparation • by By Catherine Neville • Photo by Jamie DeVillez
Posted On: 10/01/2007 E-mail This To A Friend!

More and more people want to eat restaurant-quality meals at home. Unfortunately, many of those same folks lack the time and sometimes the knowledge to cook meals from scratch. Enter meal-preparation services. These businesses have been growing in popularity exponentially over the past few years, and the latest entrant in this culinary genre is Celebrity Chef Kitchens.

Gay DeMichele, the company’s culinary director and a former director of L’École Culinaire, has developed a wide-ranging menu of items for clients to choose from, and she prides herself on CCK’s commitment to using high-quality raw ingredients and chef-driven recipes. But there’s another component to CCK that DeMichele said sets the company apart: “Our education. That’s what I feel is important, and our ability to help the family be a family again.”

This was developed as a franchise concept that can be replicated.

Mark Ebling developed the concept – he’s a Food Network addict. He has been both a franchisee and a franchisor, so he understands the franchising concept. Our other partner is Bruce Kupper, who owns Black Twig Communications, so he understands how to get the message out. And then I’m the culinary piece. … We came up with the initial design and then Mark and I would tweak it back and forth via e-mail. He knew what he wanted; I knew what I wanted it to look like.

We have three parts of our business: the retail, the cooking classes and the meal assembly. For every space that we go into, no matter what the build-out is, no matter the size of the building, there will always be those three components. You have to also look at how you’re going to get consistency, because we’ll be not just regional but nationwide. That is the plan.

Are you going to have the same menu across the board?

We want to draw on the expertise of local chefs that can tell us what’s going on in those regions. What are the people craving? What are they looking for when they want to eat? Maybe there will be some core dishes – three or four out of 16 – but we will make it regional. The concept always stays the same.

When will the franchising begin?

We sold our first one the day before we opened it; they bought two, so we have another site planned in Des Peres. And we have another franchisee couple interested in buying two more. And we have invitations to go to show in Louisville and in Atlanta, and we’re talking to people in New York.

That’s the business side. What about the food?

So it’s really about … lifestyle choices for your family, eating all together. Sitting down at a table, having the smells of a great dinner in the house. And then having the food be really good. High-quality, restaurant-quality, chef-prepared food. Then education … we want to introduce people to vegetables or meats that they’ve never experienced before. So we want to raise the bar of what people’s tastes are. I think as we’ve evolved into 2007, we’ve gotten away from things that aren’t presented in restaurants because they don’t appeal to the masses.

You get the mixed greens instead.

Exactly. So that’s the education part. Along with that, when you come in and do a cooking class or you do a meal assembly, we have a chef available so that he can talk to you about techniques and tips. For instance, we have a roast loin of pork with fennel and onion stuffing. We teach you how to do the butcher’s knot so you can tie the pork, but then you also know how to do that down the road when you’re [making] something else.

You also offer prepared foods to be taken home?

We do. It’s ready as a packet and inside is the ingredients list and how to cook it. We have Crazy Fish, which is one of our really big sellers. It’s fish en papillote – 17 minutes on a baking sheet. And also that pork loin with the fennel and onion stuffing – it’s in there too. It’s convenient. It’s for people that don’t have the time – if you’re working and you just want to take something home to fill your freezer. And then we also have fresh food to go in
the refrigerator.

What sets CCK apart?

It’s the fact that you can find all this in one place. We do team building. We do events. We do cooking classes. It’s all here.

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