City’s home chefs get websites to showcase their delicacies

Craving some home-cooked Goan sorpotel, chocolate-chip cookies or shortbread? You can now order them online, directly from home chefs in Mumbai.

Craving some home-cooked Goan sorpotel, chocolate-chip cookies or shortbread? You can now order them online, directly from home chefs in Mumbai.

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If you are a home chef yourself, you can sign in to one of these specialised websites and post images of the delicacies you can offer to others. Better still, invite a professional photographer from the website to come over and capture pictures of your meals to be displayed for viewing.

While some of the home chefs deliver food to the customer’s residence, others ask you to pick up the offerings from their homes.

Imly.in, the latest such venture — launched on June 2 — currently offers dishes by 15 home chefs, all from Mumbai.

“My idea to bring multiple Mumbai home cooks under one umbrella emerged from pestering my mother to start catering her imli [tamarind] chutney, after which the website takes its name,” said founder Abhishek Singh. “I felt that just like my mom, there were several home cooks out there who didn't have access to customers beyond friends, neighbours and extended family. Through Imly, I want to give them a platform.”

Imly.in is one of five such web-based platforms that have come up in Mumbai over the past nine months. The others are Samaas.in (Bengali, Punjabi, Puneri and Malvani cuisine), BowlsToYou.com (salads), Potluck Me (low-calorie, preservative-free foods), and Cooked-At-Home.com (an aspirational, Google-like directory for home cooks).

For consumers such as physiotherapist Shruti Parmar, a Kandivli resident, these portals are a way to try healthy, non-restaurant meals, which are different from what she eats at home. “These websites offer variety, and I can trust their quality of ingredients and hygiene standards,” says Parmar, 30, who ordered imly chutney and biscuit pudding from Imly.in last week.