Innerchef is a food tech company that was founded in April 2015. In simple terms, this is a company that offers food through it’s technology platform. You will come across the term ‘food tech’ quite often in the near future. This is because this market is worth $50 billion and is growing 🙂

Innerchef operates in Bangalore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Noida, Hyderabad and Chennai!

In the last couple of years, technology has come to the rescue of people who like to order in. I remember having saved the phone numbers of restaurants close to my home. I would call them and place my order over the call. Now, as much I like to talk to people, I would dread making that phone call! This could be attributed to the poor network reception and poor communication skills of the employees taking the orders.

With the internet becoming more and more accessible to the masses, ordering food through our smartphones has become the easiest option. All you’d need to do now is open up a food delivery application and with a couple of clicks, you will have your order placed! No more calling out your address, over the call!

Innerchef is a fast growing online food ordering platform that is very fast growing! What makes Innerchef different from it’s competition is that they take it upon themselves to deliver food without relying on any aggregators. This is a very bold approach in my opinion, because this may not bring them enough visibility in the market. But, with decisions like this, there could well be reasons. One of which I think is that they can now control the entire process. They’d be having their app display the food in the way they prefer and improve the user experience. This doesn’t end at the placing of your order; your order is also delivered by their in-house delivery staff 🙂

I was invited by Innerchef to try out their most famous dishes! Now, how much can one person really eat? May be try 3 dishes? I was able to invite a few other food bloggers, who happen to be my good friends, to try the food together. This meant, we could taste a lot more dishes, without having to waste food! Innerchef was absolutely cool about this 🙂

Packaging

As the Innerchef staff arrived at my doorstep, I could see a huge bag with lots of boxes!! I was excited about this already 🙂 Each and every box was very beautifully crafted. The color scheme was mostly white, while some boxes had a checkered pattern! The boxes were made of cardboard. I was totally impressed with the packaging. As we opened the boxes, there was a cookie in each box! That was a nice gesture 🙂 I am not going to show you a picture of the cookie 🙂 No, points for guessing why; it’s heart shaped and too cute to be pictured by a guy! Awkward 😛

What did we get?

We got a couple of beverages, a pasta, salad, couple of gravies with Indian breads, a salad with panini and three desserts!

Let’s get to the review of the items that we had.

Food

Awadh Mutton Koftas with Rumali Rotis

As we opened the box, we saw a plastic box of the Mutton curry. My first impression was that, the quantity of the gravy seemed inadequate. At the end of tasting session I was totally wrong about this! This dish came with Rumali rotis( a tandoori flatbread ) and a serving of curd.
The mutton was soft and evenly cooked. This made sure, the spoon could glide through easily to cut the Koftas into halves! The Mutton Koftas were very rich in spices and were quite delightful. The combo of Mutton Koftas with Rumali rotis was very good. The quantity of the gravy was just right for the 2 rotis 🙂

Chicken Chettinad with Malabar parathas

This dish was bustling with flavor. There were sautéed veggies mixed with cubes of chicken. The taste of chicken was very good. It was big hit in the house 🙂 The combo of Chicken with parathas was quite delectable!!

River Sole with Veggies

This dish was a grilled river sole(flatfish) in a white mustard gravy flecked with tart capers and flavorful sprigs of parsley. They’ve got a winner in this dish! I was absolutely in love with it 🙂 The fish was very tender and was brimming with the mustardy cheesy taste. The green olives added on top were an absolute delight! This dish was accompanied with grilled veggies, which were well prepared and a focaccia bread, which was very unique in taste.

Grilled chicken pasta

Al Dente Spaghetti pasta with chunks of Grilled chicken cooked in a red tomato based gravy. This dish had generous serving of black olives. The gravy had basil, parsley and parmesan cheese. I was eager to have spaghetti as I had been drooling over a spaghetti picture, clicked by a friend earlier that day!!
The grilled chicken tasted decent but the gravy composition was off and did not taste good. The chicken pieces were infused with the taste of the gravy and sort of affected the chicken as well. This dish was the weakest of all the dishes we tasted.

Chicken Kri Kri – French goat cheese salad with grilled chicken panini

This dish came with 2 grilled chicken paninis. The panini was delightful 🙂 The grilled chicken was well mashed and the flavor was excellent 🙂 There were BBQ and Agrodolce(sweet&sour) dips.

The problem with this dish was the salad. The salad had too much of lettuce in large sizes. Almost 80% of the bowl was filled with the lettuce. This was a complete let down. The bowl had goat cheese, which was decent to taste. There were also some orange slices, pomegranate seeds and almonds. These 2 fruits and the dry fruit did not quite go well with each other.

Sunrise Lemon Cake

This is touted as the best item on the entire Innerchef menu 😉 Be sure to try this out! As I opened the box, I could get a very good aroma! It looked absolutely wonderful as it had a golden tinge to it! The lemon cake was extremely light,spongy and had a good citrusy flavor to it. It was just the way I would have expected this to have been 🙂

Beverages

Lemon Mint Ice tea

This beverage was very tangy 🙂 I strangely liked this one !! A drink with mint and lemon combo is a perfect one to have in summer!

Watermelon cooler

This beverage actually has no preservatives added to it and is fresh fruit juice. Since, the delivery usually takes an hour to reach you and you spend another 15 minutes to get to this, the juice could actually spoil. The taste of the drink wasn’t great in my opinion. This is because the sweetness of the watermelons didn’t come through.

Indulge by InnerChef – Dessert Marketplace

Indulge by InnerChef is an unique concept where they allow talented home bakers to partner with Innerchef and sell their bakes!

They have a huge collection of desserts 🙂 You will be spoilt for choice, if you had to pick one!
We tried 2 desserts.

Belgian Blueberry Cheesecake Jar

This dessert was by Jeyadra, a renowned home chef!
Blueberry cheesecake is by far my most favorite dessert! I was eager to see how this one tasted 🙂 The jar looked very pretty. The glass jar showcased the beautiful layers of the cheesecake and the sauces and the biscuit base.
The cheesecake was extremely soft and creamy. The taste of blueberry came through very well. The biscuit base could probably improve. The dish was not very sweet and almost perfect in every aspect!
If I had only 1 complain, it was that the quantity was too less 🙂

Death by Chocolate Jar

This dessert was by Chocolaty Choux.
Death by chocolate is one of the most popular chocolate flavors, be it cakes, or ice-cream sundaes! This dessert was sticky alright!! The dessert seemed like melted chocolate added onto chocolate mudcake. Was it impressive? May not be the best option out of the list!

Areas of Improvement by Butter Theory

1. To be able to make sure the white cardboard boxes stay clean, you’ve got to make sure the oils within the indian curry mains are well guarded. The packaging of the curries which essentially have a lot of oil in them, has to be dealt with in a better way.

2. The presentation of all the dishes needs to be worked upon. You’ve got to make sure that the dish looks appealing enough when the user opens up the box. Most items are concealed within their own paper wrapping, leaving everything to imagination.

3. The river sole gravy could be a lot thicker to be able to pack more of the gravy in each bite. At the end of the dish, the bowl still had almost the entire gravy left to be wasted.

4. The pasta tasted too acidic. They missed a trick or two here. The acidity could have been reduced by adding more cream to the gravy and probably by caramelizing the onions. This may also be due to not using good tomatoes.

I would like to point out that except the desserts, everything else is priced well. The reason the desserts are overpriced is because this pricing may well be controlled by the home bakers. all other items are prepared in the Innerchef kitchen.

The overall experience of Innerchef was extremely good. I would not think twice before picking Innerchef over the other options! The reason you ask? They have European, Indian and Mediterranean dishes on its menu. With so many options on the menu, I would never get bored of Innerchef 🙂
Do try it out when you think about ordering in, while you watch the World Cup T20 cricket matches, with friends 🙂

I wish Innerchef all the success in their journey of spreading happiness through their food 🙂

More on InnerChef:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Inner_Chef
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/innerchefofficial/
Website: http://innerchef.com/