Imagine a week’s worth of healthy, prepared meals, tailored exactly to your tastes, appearing in your refrigerator without even lifting a finger in the kitchen. With personal chef service Bella Donna Cooks, busy professionals and health-conscience consumers can stress less about what to make for dinner, and know their next delicious meal is waiting at home.
Chef and owner A’Donna Fuller unknowingly put together her business model before she was aware Personal Chefs existed. At just ten years old, she would prepare meals for family and friends when they were sick, even buying the groceries and packing up the meals so they looked extra special. She didn’t want them to not eat well just because they didn’t feel like cooking.
Chef Fuller says she was always in the kitchen, recounting fond memories of baking holiday treats or her mother’s teasing about constantly finding pasta behind the refrigerator because she had to test the adage that it would stick when it was done. As much as she loved to cook, Fuller didn’t initially considered it for a career. Finding her first endeavor as a Technical Writer unfulfilling, she enrolled in the Culinary Art Institute. She came out a Personal Chef, and with five years of experience, started Bella Donna Cooks in 2010.
Through Bella Donna Cooks, Chef Fuller shares her highly-customizable, culinary creations with four types of services.
Weekly personal chef service leaves clients with a week of prepared meals, coupled with reheating instructions. Chef Fuller’s process ensures that hungry customers are eating foods they enjoy that coincide with any dietary restrictions or concerns. Her taste profile form gets down to the nitty-gritty and covers everything from the basics like loves and hates, to issues like allergies and medications, to little details like how small a customer might want a vegetable chopped.
Chef Fuller then sets a cook date, goes to a client’s home and spends four to eight hours preparing meals for the week. She buys all the groceries day-of and comes equipped with her mobile kitchen of tools, eliminating any worry about not having the sharpest knives or the best pots and pans. Chef Fuller works her magic, then everything is cleaned and left just as it was found.
“You don’t even know we were there until you look at the fridge,” she says.
A kitchen remodel can mean disaster on a family’s diet, but with Chef’s Family Favorites Delivered, Chef Fuller will prepare three entrees and a dessert in her commercial kitchen and deliver the meals directly.
Bella Donna Cooks rounds out their menu with one-day service, special event catering and cooking classes. One-day service means a home-cooked meal for special occasions like holiday dinners or anniversaries. Or the same great dishes are available on a larger scale for dinner parties or catered events. Finally, while customers normally steer clear of the kitchen, Chef Fuller will host a hands-on culinary classes that highlights three to four of her recipes.
Chef Fuller sees a wide client base. “Anywhere from people with health issues, people on the go, those that don’t know how to cook or don’t like to, single professionals to families,” she says. They do all have one thing in common, “Overall, everyone wants to eat healthy.”
Bella Donna Cooks caters their menus to almost any variety of health conscience. There are specialized menus for patients who are diabetic, those on low carb or low calorie diets, vegetarians, vegans and paleo, as well as more traditional menus of comfort food with a twist. While professional families have been a large part of her customer base, Chef Fuller is seeing more inquiries about her special diet menus.
For more information, visit belladonnacooks.com.
