Mium Mium Brings A Personal Chef Right To Your Kitchen

When you're hosting a group of people for dinner, your options are pretty limited: You can either take them all out to a restaurant or cook for them at a dinner party at home. Personal chefs have historically been either very expensive, hard to track down, or both. But thanks to modern technology, there are services that will easily connect you with a personal chef. While most of these are reasonably-priced, there's only one that's not only reasonably-priced, it also allows you to completely customize your meal: Canada-based Mium Mium.

Founded by a 25-year-old chef, Mium Mium is essentially a community marketplace with more than 10,000 chefs on board (and several hundred more joining per week). You pick a chef, pick a date, then coordinate the menu with your chef or choose a pre-set one. On the day of, the chef arrives with all of the necessary ingredients, cooks and serves your meal, cleans up, and heads out. As opposed to other personal chef services, which have chefs cook everything in advance in a commissary and reheat them onsite, Mium Mium chefs prepare everything from scratch. Meals can range from less than $30 per guest to more than $150 depending on what you choose to eat.

We recently received an offer to take advantage of the service, and honestly dining this way is so much fun. Having a personal chef cook for you was once reserved for only the upper classes, but now it can be much less expensive than going to a restaurant. Our chef, Craig Kravitz, began the conversation a week in advance of the meal by asking what our "dream meal" would be, but we decided to let him prepare his signature dishes, which have a Southeast Asian influence, with astounding results. The three-course meal began with a huge bowl of mussels in a complex green curry , continued with lemongrass chicken thighs, and concluded with thin-sliced beef in a rich and comforting red curry sauce with sautéed bok choy on the side. Kravitz was friendly and personable, and the meal moved along at a comfortable pace.

Using Mium Mium to book a personal chef has more benefits than may be readily apparent. For example, holiday dinners at home are a lot less stressful when someone else is cooking them. Also, having a professional chef in your kitchen opens the door to valuable interactions, because you (or your children) can watch them work and learn from them as they go. While competitors Kitchit and Kitchensurfing have both gone out of business, Mium Mium appears to still be going strong. The next time you're hosting a group dinner, don't rule out a personal chef!