Home Bistro Review - UPDATED Apr 2018
Home Bistro started out as a small New York state company working as a meal delivery service, but soon they became one of the largest in the area. In 2009, they were acquired by their largest competitor, DineWise. Together, they created a restaurant-grade gourmet meal delivery system that covers all of the United States except Hawaii and Alaska and prides itself on top quality, state-of-the-art chef-prepared cuisine delivered directly to your door. Keep reading our Home Bistro review to learn more about this company’s strengths and weaknesses and determine if they are a good fit for you.
How Home Bistro Works
The team behind Home Bistro wants to change the way you eat by looking at two crucial aspects of a successful diet – what you want to eat and how their food is made. Unlike many other meal delivery services that have a prepared set of programs for you to choose and then customize, Home Bistro offers you the chance to pick individual meals off their menu and order them at your convenience.
On their marketplace page, you can choose individual entrees or even ingredients that you can use to prepare the meals yourselves. You can call it a one-stop-shop. They offer a great variety of butcher shop quality meats and fish, as well as a great selection of side dishes.
Furthermore, you can order Home Bistro gift certificates which can prove to be a very tasty present for your family and friends. By ordering a 200$ gift certificate, you get a bonus 50$ gift certificate for free. All gift certificates are delivered to your email inbox the next day.
If you have any questions, a live chat is available during working hours from 9am to 5pm Eastern Standard Time. While researching for this Home Bistro review, we talked to the customer support staff a few times and were pleasantly surprised by just how professional and friendly they were. Home Bistro also has a pretty extensive FAQ section where you will probably find the answers to a majority of questions that could arise.
What Makes Home Bistro Different?
Home Bistro challenges the notion that food is just an industry. That is why they are trying to bring a combination of innovation, skill, and ethics into preparing the finest cuisine available, with the freshest ingredients.
One of their best advantages is the kitchen run by a Certified Executive Chef CEC®, a certificate presented by the American Culinary Federation and one of the highest standards that a chef can receive. Fun fact – only 1/4 of 1% chefs in America earn this distinction.
Home Bistro is also committed to providing the best possible solutions for families, no matter if they’re looking just for fantastic gourmet cuisine or they want to lose a couple of pounds with the help of a healthy diet plan. They even provide their customers with raw meat and fish of the highest quality for the days when they choose to prepare meals themselves.
With Home Bistro, you don’t need to go food shopping anywhere else. They are constantly sourcing the most natural ingredients as close to home as possible and bringing innovations to their menus and flavors to make each dish as satisfying and heart healthy as possible. They are also partnered with two meat producers – Colorado Native Foods and Aspen Ridge Natural Beef – which allows them to use poultry and beef of the highest possible quality.
There are also ongoing promotions in the sales section of their website and you can order a wide selection of your favorite recipes for less than 15$ per meal on average.
On top of everything, the CEO of Home Bistro offers his unconditional guarantee that every customer will be satisfied. You can replace any item you’re not satisfied with, or they will offer you a refund, depending on the circumstances. In his own words – “If you don’t love our new food then it’s on me.”
Meals and Recipes
As you might have deduced from our Home Bistro review, Home Bistro is very passionate about food. All the dishes are prepared to be truly exquisite and the quality remains even though all the meals are fresh frozen and require reheating before serving. It’s ready to eat in less than 10 minutes.
The recipes are also very creative. Along with the more classic ones that always get the job done, there are also very innovative meals with a note of exotic cuisines – either a revamped classic with a great new twist or something completely original.
You can order just one meal and you can order as often as you see fit. Just keep in mind that Home Bistro does deliveries only Wednesday through Saturday. Moreover, you can choose to order finished meals or even fresh ingredients.
The marketplace is organized by the type of meat that you prefer. You can choose fish, poultry, beef, pork, veal, and lamb. Next up, you can accompany your preferred meat by a selection of side dishes and round up everything with a sweet tasting dessert.
When it comes to prepared packages, there is very little customization and you can only choose the whole package and pay the full price for it. Unlike some other meal delivery services, Home Bistro doesn’t provide that many prepared meal plans, only the options that show a selection of items that fit the preference you’ve chosen (vegetarian, gluten-free, heart-friendly, diabetic-friendly, low sodium, low carb, paleo, etc.).
Pricing
One of the best features that Home Bistro offers is the chance to order exactly how many dishes you want. All prepared meals are priced per serving. When it comes to ordering your perfect cut of meat, there’s an option to pick the amount from a multiple choice drop-down menu on an appropriate product.
When it comes to actual prices, the cost of a single side dish starts at around 9$ while the assortments of meats start at 20$ for the smallest pack of chicken breasts. Since there isn’t a page dedicated to pricing, you are forced to go through every single entree individually and see the total amount you’d have to pay. That is also an issue that Home Bistro can look at.
Delivery Areas
Just like most other meal delivery services, Home Bistro offers nationwide home delivery. Delivery covers all parts of the contiguous United States while Alaska and Hawaii are still unavailable. You also don’t need to be physically present to receive your order.
All of the orders are shipped by FedEx and marked as “Driver Release,” which means that the package will be delivered to the recipient address and left at any exterior door, with no signature required. Most orders ship within 3 to 6 business days from the day you place your order and you cannot split an individual order to be shipped to 2 different addresses.
- Certified Executive Chef CEC heads the kitchen
- Restaurant-grade quality food
- Chicken is 100% antibiotic-free, vegetarian-fed, and cage-free family
- Beef is 100% vegetarian-fed with no growth hormones or antibiotics
- Very assertive customer care department
- Insulated boxes keep the food fresh on delivery day
- Low on pre-made plans
- No dedicated pricing page
- Website isn’t user-friendly
- More expensive than the competition
Bottom Line
Experiencing restaurant-quality cuisine in the comfort of our home is a thing we’re all thinking about, some more often than others. Home Bistro has dedicated their business model to providing their customers with the best possible dining experience that you can get from a fresh frozen meal delivery service. Their ingredients are handpicked for the perfect flavor and prepared by a kitchen team led by a Certified Executive Chef. Although pricey, they still manage to attract enough customers by maintaining their high standards of quality, both in the nutrition and taste departments.
