This App Lets You Buy Home-Cooked Meals From Your Neighbors

Craving a home-cooked meal? There’s an iPhone app for that. It’s fittingly called Homemade, and it allows people to order food that was lovingly baked, simmered, sautéed, or stewed in a neighbor’s kitchen.

According to Brokelyn, the location-based cooking service allows hungry users to create a user profile of foods they like. They’re alerted when a nearby chef is whipping up one of their favorite dishes, and they can request a meal for pick-up or delivery.

Of course, good food often takes effort and time—so for certain labor-intensive orders, like fresh bread, you’ll have to order it in advance. Also, some cooks require a certain minimum number of orders for transactions to go through.

Cooks can apply to sell food via Homemade by detailing their relevant experience and submitting informal portfolios of their culinary creations. They’ll also have to fill out a questionnaire, and will be subject to an in-home taste test and kitchen inspection. However, customers should keep in mind that Homemade still isn’t regulated. Your meal wasn’t prepared in a restaurant kitchen, so you don’t know if its cook has a food handling license. (Homemade classifies your payments as “donations” to avoid being fined for selling food without a licensed commercial kitchen.) In short, if a chef leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you can rate their food and leave comments, but the consequences are a bit murkier than with a traditional food vending situation.

As of right now, Homemade is available for residents in all five boroughs in New York City. (According to CityLab, more than 70 cooks are currently peddling their food on the mobile app.) Eventually, the company hopes to expand to other metropolitan areas.  Learn more about the app—which co-founder Nick Devane describes as “like Etsy, for food"—in the video above, or meet one of its chefs below. 

Header and banner image courtesy of iStock.