I keep thinking about selling a small weekend menu — am I being realistic or just romanticising it?
I used to work around restaurants and kitchens, and although I have a full-time job now, I still really enjoy cooking for other people. There is something strangely satisfying about planning a menu, buying too many onions, spending hours in the kitchen, and then watching everything disappear from the table.
Friends have occasionally said, “You should sell this,” which is flattering — but also exactly the kind of sentence that can give someone a slightly irresponsible idea.
Lately I’ve been imagining something very small: one or two dishes, orders closing on Thursday, cooking a fixed amount, and pickup on Saturday. No restaurant, no daily delivery, and definitely no plan to quit my job. Just a tiny weekend food drop to see whether people other than my friends would actually pay for it.
But I may be remembering the fun parts of food work and conveniently forgetting the cleaning, planning, regulations and difficult customers. So I would love to hear from people in the Netherlands who have actually sold meals, cakes, bread, snacks or meal boxes from home.
- Did complete strangers really buy from you, or were most customers friends and friends-of-friends?
- How did you decide what to charge? Did you count your own hours, or would the final price have become ridiculous?
- Roughly how much revenue and profit can a good weekend produce — and how many hours does it really take?
- Which registrations, food-safety rules or permissions did you need before starting?
- Do customers normally pay in advance? What happens when someone cancels, complains or simply never comes to collect their food?
- Have you had any unusually funny, awkward or completely unreasonable customer requests?
- How do you keep WhatsApp or Instagram orders from turning into a mess?
- If you were in my position, would you try it — or would you tell me to keep cooking for friends and protect my weekends?
I’m not looking for motivational answers. Honest numbers, boring details and cautionary stories are probably more useful. I’m also interested in whether the ordering process itself could be made less chaotic, but I’m not selling or linking anything here.