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| The Dinner A’Fare – Making Meals from Scratch Simple by Jenica Smith If you’ve ever come home from a long day of work, errands, and chauffeuring kids around and then faced a freezer stocked with frozen pre-packaged meals for dinner, you probably thought… well, yuck. But what if those meals were not cardboard-enclosed microwave dinners, but entrees handmade by you from scratch and just waiting to be popped in the oven? That’s the concept that The Dinner A’Fare, a Lawrenceville store owned and operated by Stephanie and Ken Wright, has been introducing to busy Atlantans since opening its doors in June of 2004. At The Dinner A’Fare, customers, or “chefs”, come in at a prearranged time and take a position at one of the six kitchen stations. A recipe, ingredients and wrapping materials are provided at each station and chefs prepare up to 12 meals as they rotate around the kitchen. In a two-hour session, a chef can prepare and take home enough food to feed a hungry family for weeks. “The concept has been around for 50 years,” Stephanie Wright said. “People will try to make their meals ahead of time to save time during the week.” What has not been around for years is the idea of a business like The Dinner A’Fare. The concept of a kitchen as a business was so new that Wright said she and Ken had to wait for the Health Department to write new codes and guidelines for a food preparation establishment that was not a restaurant and not a grocery store. “I tried to take something that’s old and make it modern,” Wright said. She and her husband painstakingly planned ways to make pre-making meals from scratch easier and user-friendly for the chef. A session at The Dinner A’Fare works like this: A chef registers for a session through the The Dinner A’Fare web site, and chooses six or 12 meals in any combination from the 15-meal menu. The chef then shows up at the appointed date and time with a cooler or laundry basket to cart home the meals. He or she then rotates through the stations, making each selected dish until all are prepared, packed and labeled. Each station offers step-by-step instructions, pre-measured and prepped ingredients and detailed directions for cooking the meal once it has been taken home and frozen. Each session has a flat price and varies depending on the amount of food. Twelve meals that serve up to six people cost $210 while 12 meals that serve three people or six meals that serve six people are both $135. At those prices, the cost per serving for the 12 six-serving meals is $2.92. The dishes available at The Dinner A’Fare change monthly and at the time of this article, included items such as chicken cordon bleu, teriyaki beef kabobs and brown sugar chipotle salmon. For each new menu, Wright said she tries to offer a well-rounded variety as well as mostly healthy selections. Each menu includes four options that are either vegetarian or easily altered to become vegetarian. If an incoming chef has a dietary problem or a food allergy, the The Dinner A’Fare staff will go through each menu item ahead of time and remove or alter the problematic item from each recipe. Wright, who is inspired by the simple things in life, like eating a good meal with friends, is quite an inspiration herself. Accidentally paralyzed during surgery when she was 15, Wright has spent half her life in a wheelchair. “It doesn’t really affect me,” she said. “It has inspired me to look at the part of life that some people forget about. Running your errands, going to work: that’s life. Enjoy it and embrace it. If you don’t like it, quit your job and do something you like.” Which is exactly what Wright did. Upon moving to Atlanta with her now husband, she couldn’t find a job that she liked, so she decided to fulfill her dream of self-employment. “I always knew that I wanted my own space to sell something to inspire people.” She and Ken opened their first business venture, a do-it-yourself pottery shop called The Painted Potter, almost two years before opening the doors of The Dinner A'Fare. Wright spent a year in planning before The Dinner A'Fare opened. She researched recipes and tested foods multiple times before adding each recipe to the menu. She finds inspiration in cooking magazines and shows, but modifies the recipes herself through trial and error to make sure that everything is designed to freeze well. The Wrights are opening a second The Dinner A'Fare in The Avenues at West Cobb this summer and franchising is in the near future. The Wrights have already had offers from several hopefuls who want to open other Atlanta locations. But in 15 more years, Wright says she hopes she’ll still be in her first two stores watching her customers take the time to enjoy life. The Dinner A'Fare is located in the Discover Mills Station shopping center at 1820 North Brown Road Ste. 70, Lawrenceville, GA 30043. To learn more about The Dinner A'Fare and the Wrights, visit them on the web at www.simply-supper.com or call (678) 847-6050. |
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