After noticing a huge pool of culinary talent hidden in Bangkok's home kitchens — and a growing demand for authentic meals — Samuel Coizet and Pakki Sampataphakdee co-founded Kinkao (www.kinkao.co), an online platform that allows home chefs to cook and sell home-made meals to the people in their neighbourhoods. From Vietnamese to Mexican to Southern Thai, you can find nearly every type of cuisine on the website. We spoke with the founders about their endeavour.
How many chefs are you expecting to join the Kinkao community by the end of 2016?
We're adding five to six chefs a week, and we're not planning on slowing down. So far, we have more than 250 people who have signed up. We can't take everyone on, because our focus is on central Bangkok at the moment. We also filter them for their culinary knowledge. We're confident that we will have more than 300 home chefs before the end of the year. Our main purpose of adding more chefs is to become hyper-local. The more chefs we have, the more we can close our radius of delivery and feed our local community with more variety of quality cooking.
What are some of your favourite meals on Kinkao?
We are very impressed with chef Divesh's khao khluk krapao minced lamb. He has elevated the Thai traditional dish; it's spicy yet punchy, with lots of Mediterranean flavours from the lamb. The portion is generous, affordable and tastes so good.
On the dessert side, our favourite is chef Vince. Imagine getting a whole pie fresh out of the oven for less than B500. This is the price of two slices of cake from a fancy place in a mall. Try his lemon tart or chocolate roll -- they are amazing.
What do you look for when choosing chefs?
When we interview, we ask them a series of questions. But the main questions that make them eligible are the ones about their practices and background: What are their signature dishes? How do they prepare? What ingredients do they use? Where do they buy groceries? Even down to detailed question like what brand of butter they use. If their answers involve a lot of pre-made or processed products, we usually decline them.
What type of food would you like to see more home chefs cook?
We love when it's 100% home-made, and we love to see unique meals. For Thai food, we want to see the cuisine taken new heights with fresh and premium ingredients, [and] big portions with a lot of meat. We'd love to see authentic meals such as ethnic dishes that you can't find on the street or that are only sold for very expensive prices in restaurants.
Will you be creating a Kinkao mobile application?
We will definitely make an app for Kinkao. We decided to start with a responsive website, because we want to be able to listen to our customers and chefs on a daily basis and make instant changes.
Do you still eat out?
Sure, we love eating out. We've been new restaurant hunters for years and this is not going to change. Our lives are very busy at the moment, so we're eating out less and ordering on Kinkao most days of the week. Our favourites places are JP Restaurant for French food, Appia for Italian, Escapade for burgers, Arno's Butcher for steaks, Wine Depot for a drink, Eat for Thai food and The Glass House Pattaya for seafood.
