What’s for dinner?
The question that somehow comes every. single. night.
There are nights when cooking is absolutely not happening, but ordering takeout for the third time that week doesn’t sound particularly appealing either. Enter the increasingly useful middle ground: fresh, fully prepared meals sitting in your refrigerator waiting for you.
Same problem. Two very good solutions.
Two services Greenwich families should know about are Kinney Lane and Feast & Fettle. They solve the same problem in slightly different ways, and both make the 6 PM scramble significantly easier.
Kinney Lane is the hyperlocal option. Based at 31 Vitti Street in New Canaan, the chef-driven prepared meal service offers fresh, ready-to-eat meals for customers throughout Fairfield and Westchester Counties. New menus are released Tuesday afternoons, orders close Friday night, and meals are delivered or available for pickup the following week. Deliveries run Mondays and Wednesdays, and the New Canaan location also has grab-and-go market hours on those days.
The menu changes weekly, which is part of the appeal. Instead of feeling like a traditional meal-plan subscription, you can essentially stock the refrigerator with whatever works for your household that week. Meals come in individual portions as well as larger family sizes, and most are gluten- and dairy-free, with exceptions clearly marked.
Kinney Lane also cooks with avocado, olive and coconut oils and focuses on responsibly sourced ingredients and local farms.
And if you fail to plan ahead, which is usually when this type of service becomes most necessary, the New Canaan market offers grab-and-go meals Mondays and Wednesdays from noon to 4 PM.
Feast & Fettle is the bigger operation, but the concept started on a very personal scale. The company began in 2016 as a small nanny and personal-chef service cooking for busy families. It has since grown into a multi-state prepared meal company, including service in Connecticut and Greenwich.
The concept is essentially a personal chef without having a personal chef. Meals arrive fully prepared and refrigerated, then can be heated whenever you are ready to eat. Customers can customize orders based on household size and order as needed, without a long-term commitment. Feast & Fettle says its meals are made from fresh, seasonal ingredients without additives and are personally delivered rather than shipped through a third party.
The menu is also much broader than dinner. Current offerings span entrées and sides along with kids’ meals, lunches, breakfast items, juices, bakery items and desserts, making it possible to solve considerably more than the Tuesday-night-dinner problem with one delivery.
Think of Kinney Lane as the local, New Canaan-based option with a rotating menu and a market you can physically pop into. Feast & Fettle is the larger-scale alternative with an extensive menu and home delivery model.
Because sometimes the greatest luxury isn’t getting a reservation. It’s opening the refrigerator at 6 PM and realizing dinner is already handled.
Save these two for the next time someone in your house asks, “Should we just order something?”