yhangry Review: Dinner Party
AD – Gifted Experience
Do you love the idea of hosting a dinner party but hate the idea of cooking? If you enjoy entertaining but find the idea of catering for multiple people too stressful, yhangry could be the solution. At the weekend, we invited a few friends and family over for dinner. Instead of slaving away in the kitchen ready to serve our guests, we chilled out watching the rugby until they arrived. Chef Dean from yhangry did all the hard work for us. And what a feast he prepared. Check out our yhangry review to see why hiring a private chef is a great alternative to going out for a meal.
About yhangry
In case you didn’t see yhangry on Dragon’s Den back in 2021, I’ll tell you a bit about it. They provide private chefs across the UK at an affordable price. With a minimum spend of just £200, it can work out cheaper to have a chef come to you than it is to go out to a restaurant. For families, it also saves on the inconvenience of getting a babysitter. Of course you can provide your own drinks too, resulting in a further saving. In fact, the whole company was based on the premise of reducing the cost of hiring a private chef at home.
Better still, yhangry takes care of everything. All you need to do is give them your choice of menu, tell them how many are eating, and any dietary requirements. The chef arrives a couple of hours before dinner is due to be served and starts to cook. They use all your pots, pans, plates and cutlery so make sure you’ve got everything you’ll need. Ours ended up being served on an array of mismatched dishes but it didn’t matter at all. It was a joyful experience being able to stay at home AND enjoy a delicious meal that we didn’t prepare.
If, like me, you’re dying to know what happened on Dragon’s Den, I’ll tell you. After the usual dragon wrangling and fire breathing, the founders of yhangry secured an investment from Peter Jones and Tej Lalvani. At the time, they were only based in London but shortly afterwards, they expanded to offer their good value private chef promise in Manchester. Since then, they have continued to grow. Now, you can simply enter your postcode on the yhangry website and they’ll match you with a private chef in your area.
The range of menus on the yhangry website provides plenty of choice for any event. It doesn’t even have to be dinner; they provide brunch, lunch and afternoon tea as well. There are even special menus for children available. Ideal for a birthday party or kids’ celebration. Choose from a variety of cuisines and the chef will provide several options for your party. They are very careful with dietary requirements and were happy to provide a fully vegetarian meal for our party too.
As a group, we were a little bit fussy with conflicting requirements. As half of us were vegetarian, I asked for the menu to be veggie because it seemed easier. I had forgotten that one of our guests doesn’t like cheese or creamy things and another isn’t keen on various vegetables. Despite our somewhat specific needs, Chef Dean was able to come up with a menu that we would all love.
We chose loaded nachos as a starter with butternut squash tachos as a main. When it came to it, we decided we’d prefer just to put all the food out together so we could help ourselves. This worked brilliantly with tacho wraps, salad, loaded nachos, sour cream, grated cheese, guacamole, spiced cabbage and jalapeños all laid out in the middle of the table. We could all take some of what we wanted and there was plenty to go around.
Preparing for our yhangry event
As I mentioned previously, one of the best things about using yhangry is that it doesn’t take much preparation at all on the part of the hosts. All I had to do was decide on a menu and send round an invitation link to everybody who would be coming.
They were able to accept the invitation online, and enter their allergies, intolerances and dietary requirements at the same time. This is particularly convenient if you have a large number of attendees or you don’t know the diners very well. It’s another layer of checks to make sure nobody ends up eating something that would be harmful to them.
Other than that, the only requirement was to be available a couple of hours before serving time to let the chef in. We did chat to him in the kitchen while he was preparing the meal, but that wasn’t necessary at all. He was just great fun to be around and we were in there anyway watching the rugby so we stayed for a chat.
Our yhangry review
As you have probably worked out by now, our yhangry review is entirely positive. We had a brilliant experience with yhangry and Dean was a fantastic chef. Dinner was delicious and it was a pleasure to have him there as well. If you’re like me, you might worry that having a private chef in your kitchen would be awkward. That wasn’t the case at all. Our kitchen is open plan and our pots, pans and utensils are far from brilliant. Dean wasn’t bothered by this at all and we didn’t feel judged for not having enough matching plates or serving bowls.
Serving our starter and main together meant the whole meal was an extremely relaxed affair. Just what we wanted for a family meal. We all enjoyed what we had and the spicy and creamy dishes were separate so those who didn’t like those flavours didn’t have to eat them. Personally, I tried some of everything. It was a treat that it was all veggie and I could do so. I couldn’t fault any of it and we can’t even complain that there wasn’t enough, because there was plenty left over. I just polished off the last of the salad for lunch today.
When it came to dessert, this was something simple that we all enjoyed. Dean sliced up a fresh pineapple and cooked it in spiced syrup. It was served with ice cream. There were clean plates all round.
Not only would I highly recommend using yhangry, we’re already debating booking another event through them. It’s such a convenient way to host a party that I would be surprised if we didn’t do it again by the end of the year. To find out more about them or book your own feast, head to the yhangry website.
