Chef by Request

Seriously YUM. The food is paleo and tastes great! The new fresh, delivery service they just started blows my mind. The chef is amazing and has her own business outside of cooking for Chef by Request! Obviously most working people don’t have tons of time to cook on weeknights, so what’s better than organic food delivered to your doorstep.

I used this service for a long time. At first, the food was delicious and I lost weight. Every once and a while, I did not like a meal, but the next day the service was redeemed. After their name change to Loss Arts, the food changed drastically — it was mostly horrible. I ended up throwing away more meals than I ate.
Many times, the plastic cover on the food was broken into multiple pieces, making the food impossible to eat unless I picked out the plastic. When I called to complain, customer service gave me an extra day of food to make up for the plastic. This was appreciated. However, when the food kept getting worse tasting, I decided to cancel the service. I had signed up for auto renewal, but they «lost» my cancellation request and charged my credit card. When I called up to get a refund, they told me it would take 4 – 6 weeks to get a refund. That was 8 weeks ago and I’m still waiting. I’ve called repeatedly to speak with customer service, and also got the owner on the phone, but still no check. They’ve forced me to initiate legal action against the company.
I would not recommend this service to anyone.

The food was ok, and I was planning to give it a 3 star. I did this service with a groupon type offer, and would have thought it was overpriced had I paid full price though. My big problem why I’m giving it a 2 instead of a 3 is that it has been 3 weeks and they have still not taken away their bags from off my front step. I am sick of looking at them.

Well, I’ve lost over 200 pounds. I lost the first 50 with Chef by Request, then had gastric bypass. Chef by Request was very important in the first few months of my journey. They were a very professional group. I wouldn’t be where I am today had I not had their help.

I got a partial refund on my credit card after getting a bug in my meal along with other problems. Then the place challenged it and clawed part of my refund back. Plus, their sales people have been telemarketing me, trying to get me to sign up again. They called me at work. These people suck.

Be very aware of this service. I just had a baby so no time to cook. I ordered chef by request for three months. Once I signed up they never told me that there was absolutely no way you could get your money back if you don’t like their service and food. So don’t be stupid like me and don’t sign up for more than two days if after you read this review you still decided to try, that way if you don’t like the service you won’t get stuck like me.
First if your apartment has a security code to get in you are in the hands of the delivery man hours. Sometimes I get my food delivered at 5 sometimes at 1AM. Who in their right minds would like to go get their food at one in the morning? No one. Also if the driver comes every day after 10 but one day he decides to come at 5pm and you are not home. Your loss… They will not reimburse you for that. So pretty much you are required to be home all the time or your loss.
And the food is pretty much the same all the time. salad for lunch. And steak/​chicken/​turkey and vegetables for dinner. So after two weeks you will get bored of the food. But you cannot cancel it.
So now I’m stuck with their services until the end of the year. That means waking up at 1AM to get my food. And be home whenever they decide to deliver the food or I lose it. How’s that for a great service???

The problem is that my driver’s license was suspended, and although I could have walked around the corner to get decent food from several restaurants, I chose to have food delivered instead, after an online search found ‘Chef By Request’ for me. I thought, well, why not. So I delved into trying it without reading any of the reviews on Unilocal.And… as I’ve learned, the food is quite bad. I signed-​up for a week to see if I would like it. I asked for «The Zone Menu», but every time they deliver, I get «The Paleo Menu.» After looking into this, and having been made to feel like an ape from 2.5 million years ago, I called them to ask why I received a different menu. They said that sometimes the menus are so similar, no differences can be discerned. Okay, fine. Then they added, oh, by the way, they will be delivering my food every two days, and this wouldn’t be the case just because the Labor Day weekend was approaching. Initially, I asked them to skip September 4^th and to deliver on September 5^th, because I wanted fresher food (and you would think that they would be able to do so)…but granted, I don’t live in San Francisco. Another annoyance is that I’ve had a salad every day for lunch since my program started. I was hoping for something more substantial. And then, in today’s salad, I found leafy green vegetables with bug bites in them. Finally, the last annoyance is that I’ve had a quiche every day, either for breakfast or as a snack. I really think that this company doesn’t care much about its consumers. Also, it seems that they can hardly manage their company’s operations.

I wanted to be fair to this service in my review, so waited until the end of a month of delivered meals to write this.
Let’s begin with the positive:
1. very helpful staff. Every time an issue came up, I received quick and courteous service from their central office (in Washington?).
2. Deliveries were prompt and timely.
hmmm. Ran out of positives.
On to the not so good:
1. The food is really bad. I mean, these meals make hospital food look great. We are talking bland, boiled meats and vegetables. Absolutely no spice/​flavor. The good news is that there’s very little of it.
2. Very little rotation of food, you will see the same meals repeat over and over again.
3. I would have been willing to overlook the bad tasting food on repeat, but more than once I had to throw away meals because I was worried the food was not fresh/​smelled off/​spoiled.
I kept the food refrigerated as soon as it was delivered, and did not let it sit in my refrigerator. One meal in particular was delivered in the morning. By lunchtime I opened the container and thought the smell was abnormal so decided to chuck it in my office trashcan and just ate fruit for lunch. By 3 pm the smell coming from my trashcan was so disgusting that I had to wrap the whole thing in a bag and dispose of it outside of my office. T
he Zone meals (the option I chose) are very meat-​heavy and I got the feeling the cuts of meats used are not anything I would ever buy for myself (eg what is found in the «half off» sale bin at the grocery store).
4. On several occasions I was shorted a meal/​snack. The food was so bad I actually did not mind.
ok, so we have bad food/​repeating bad food/​and the opportunity to land in the emergency room with severe food poisoning on top of that? Oh, did I mention that the price you pay for this privilege is 16 dollars per meal???
I could not wait for the month to end.
I would not recommend this service for anyone looking for meal delivery. Chef Request delivers a sub-​par (if not outright spoiled) product at outrageous prices. There must be a tremendous pressure to use the cheapest and (thus least) fresh ingredients to push the profit margin. Although in theory I liked the idea and convenience of meal delivery and was willing to pay (premium prices) for this service, I was very disapointed in this particular business.

The food is good most of the time, sometimes it can fall flat and there can be some repitition, but overall good quality that reheats well.
If you want to lose weight give yourself over to it. (3 meals 2 snacks a day). It works.

Not happy with this service. I chose the Paleo option. Time wise, it was fine: delivered by 8pm each night, the double day delivery was about 9:45pm.
The first three days of food were pretty good, so I called and got another week… not very good after that.
I had to throw out two complete dinners because they were disgusting. Two more I threw out the very overcooked veggies and had to make my own. The «spiced rubbed» turkey in one of the salads was just plain. Guac does not keep and ends up all brown. The beef was fatty and chewy. I question the quality of the meats. One lunch was canned tuna and soup… NOT worth $ 14 for a meal! The black berry dressing was very seedy, there’s a green dressing which is basically just tomatillo salsa… not what I want on a spinach salad.
Twice the delivery bags were very smokey which I immediately took back outside so my house didn’t reek.
Good luck making any changes after trying two days of food… you can’t make any changes mid week… which I tried to do after 4dinners in a row with over cooked zuchinni.
My advice: buy prepared meals and make your own salads from whole foods… even with their prices you’ll save money and get MUCH better quality and better tasting food!
With this service, every lunch is a salad or a tuna/​chicken salad + soup.
I wrote this with two more days of meals to go… and my second to last day the meals were decent, but I just threw out another lunch. The steak salad was pretty inedible as well… the steak was not good quality and tasted terrible, once again the dressing was more like a salsa/​marinade (glad I tasted it before putting it on the salad). I was able to salvage the egg and the raw spinach and that was it… but do you want to eat just plain spinach leaves?
3 days in the same week spinach salads… really?!

i have to admit, i didn’t realize how good this stuff was until i tried another service (the fresh diet). in comparison, the meals are much better with chef by request: the flavors are more interesting, the portions are bigger (so you feel full), but you still achieve the same mix of carbs/​protein/​fat. the prices are fairly comparable and it’s not cheap, but if you can get some sort of discount, it’s well worth doing. also, the drivers are very courteous and they were very conscientious about making sure i was early on the route since i’m unavailable later in the evenings and do not want to be woken up in the middle of the night in order to grant the driver access to the building. the one difference between this service and the fresh diet is that the latter actually lets you choose every component of your meal and warns you if something you’ve chosen contains something in your basket of dislikes. with chef by request, i had to learn by trial and error what to notify my rep that i didn’t like so it could be avoided in the future. but even with the unwanted components, the meals were still very good!

I am so glad that I chose to try this service. The food is generally really fresh and well prepared (true to their gourmet name). The people who answer the phones, and the guy who delivers my meals every day (on time no less) are really nice. I’ve cut fat and gained muscle mass over the past three weeks. No complaints… 5 stars (never thought I’d say that with regard to a diet)!

This service delivers precooked meals and delivers them to your door daily. I was looking for a way to change the way I was eating, but I didn’t really have the time to cook healthy meals every single day. Plus, I didn’t want to have to do all the shopping and cleanup.
On a scale of 1 – 10, the meals have ranged from 7 to 9. Totally acceptable considering the cost and convenience. I went with the Zone meals and at first I was skeptical about not being able to choose my meals, but in the end it was kinda nice to just come home and eat what was ready to go. It was the same feeling as when I was a kid and would come home and ask, «What’s for dinner?»
Initially I did a 3 day trial and they threw in some nice snacks and a couple of lunches to try — I was only ordering the breakfasts and dinners. They threw in some free snacks as well but they seemed a little overpriced for what you got.
First week menu:
Pumpkin Walnut muffin with soy butter and fruit
Chicken Pecan Salad
BBQ Pork Loin w/​fried okra and broccoli
Red Pepper Fritatta
Turkey Wrap
Chicken Marsala
Waffles and Turkey Sausage
??
Poached Salmon w/​cream sauce over bow tie pasta
All the dishes re-​heat nicely, even a few days later.
I just signed up for 2 more weeks.