Can Meal Kits Keep Us Connected to Restaurants, and Each Other?

Home cooks share their attempts making Xi’an’s Famous Foods’ hand-pulled noodles. Photo: Jason Wang/Youtube Once a year, Cathleen Nguyen books a flight from Dallas to New York City to eat her way through a checklist of her favorite restaurants.

“It was actually really fun to pull the noodles,” says Nguyen, who ordered Xi’an’s kit online for delivery to Texas. The process of making the noodles was trial and error at first: “I took the two ends of the dough, and stretched it out really hard, and the whole thing just broke in half.” But she eventually mastered the technique, and the final dish “tasted just like the noodles in the restaurant.

In addition to sandwiches, her other ventures Tokyo Record Bar and Air’s Champagne Parlor have offered omakase bento boxes, wine boxes, sake pairings, and multiple combinations of caviar-and-snack kits with fun themes like “Keep it Sexy” and “Feeling Fancy.” The diverse array of offerings highlight Arce’s ability to keep the curated spirit of her businesses alive in spite of quarantine.

Celebrity aside, the fixed costs of labor, storage, and shipping meal kits pose a massive hurdle, especially during a pandemic when money is already tight. In the case of Xi’an, the restaurant was already equipped with 20,000 square feet of storage space, including walk-in fridges, says the franchise’s CEO, Jason Wang, but he points out that most New York City restaurants don’t have that luxury.

Although meal kits have become a recognizable fixture of the culinary landscape, they’re not the industry’s saving grace. “The reason I’m in Korea right now is because I haven’t gotten a paycheck from either of my restaurants since March,” says Kim, who’s filming a TV show abroad to make mortgage payments and ensure his staff is taken care of. He puts as much as $3,000 a week into his restaurants, and he knows other chefs who are funneling even more.

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