The NamiChef Story

I started NamiChef simply because the more I cooked at home, the better I got at it and I became able to make great food without a sophisticated kitchen.  I have a tiny kitchen in a small New York City apartment equipped with the barest essentials:  refrigeration, heat, and water.

From there it’s just been a question of finding a recipe that I think will taste good and the necessary ingredients. 

Let’s start with the ingredients.  That’s the foundation of every home-cooked food dish.  Today we have more access to more ingredients than ever.  We can buy food from around the globe, within a 20-minute car ride or if we live in a city, a 10-minute walk and if we can’t find something, there is a good chance that someone can deliver it to us.

We all have our favorite places to shop.  Some places due to convenience, others because of their high quality.  Some people will even go to several stores to accumulate the perfect ingredients for a meal (guilty as charged).

That’s where I envision NamiChef coming in handy.  My goal is to build a platform that will guide participants to the best ingredients in their area.  In some cases, it’s a quest for a hard-to-find Asian ingredient.  In others, it’s just finding the basics like chicken or fish.  I want to help people find the best possible products at the best possible prices for their home-cooked meals.

So you finally have all of your home-cooked food ingredients.  How do you execute the dish?  What if you need a little extra help beyond the recipe or a YouTube video?

That brings us to the second component of NamiChef.  Guidance on how to make restaurant-quality meals at home.  My goal is to supply the NamiChef community with 24/7 online access to skilled cooks.  This team will be both professional kitchen people as well as skilled home cooks.  You can book them in advance if you need help with an entire recipe or meal or in real-time to get advice to determine if your dish is done. 

I think that this commercial provides an excellent example of getting last-minute help with a dish

Amazon Echo Show TV Commercial, ‘Cooking Together’

What is the ultimate goal of NamiChef?  I want to bring out the chef in all of us.  I truly believe that each of us is one of the best chefs that we know and that we can recreate restaurant-quality dishes in our home kitchens if we can source great ingredients and get a little help with those ingredients when we need it.

Enjoy!