“I make a lot of money,” says Cory Jackson, an Upper West Side chef who offers American, Caribbean and soul food dishes with two sides from $15 per meal.
Jackson, who lost his job at an office catering company at the start of the pandemic, joined WoodSpoon five months ago. His online restaurant, Munch, is about the only soul dining option in his neighborhood, he says, so there’s a lot of demand.
WoodSpoon’s home-cooked meals have been able to attract diners, including immigrants looking for authentic meals, takeout-dependent families looking for healthy options, and food adventurers looking for unusual ones they couldn’t find in restaurants, says Kalish Rozengarten, a Tel Aviv native who dreamed up the concept after having a fondness for Israeli Shakshuka she smelled of a neighbor’s cooking.
The idea of ordering food from a stranger’s kitchen may seem strange, she acknowledged, but so is the idea of spending the night in a stranger’s room before the arrival of Airbnb.
Unlike Airbnb, the concept can’t work everywhere, says Charlie Federman, partner at Silvertech Ventures, one of WoodSpoon’s early investors.
“We could rent a farm in remote Montana because we want to get away from it all,” Federman says, “but you’re not going to order food delivery there.”
But any town with, say, a few thousand people and a few dozen home chefs could work for WoodSpoon, he says. Although big cities seem like obvious opportunities, the company might fare even better in the suburbs, where orders tend to be bigger and people tend to have few delivery options.
“If we were 10% of Airbnb,” he says, “that would be a big win for a lot of people.”
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