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madbakerThis week's Lockdown Takeout Review: La Cocina.
La Cocina is an incubator for women starting small food-based businesses, primarily but not exclusively immigrants. They provide kitchen facilities to start out, help with business plans, and generally are a noble cause. They have a number of success stories such as Reem's. So when the curvy upstairs neighbor linked to their weekly quarantine variety box, we thought we'd try it.
Each week they have about 10 things from various alumnae businesses; all the proceeds go to the companies, so it's still helping support locals even if (most of them) aren't necessarily restaurants. They were sold out of the 2-person boxes, so we split a 4-person box with upstairs.
What worked: Pickup was quick and easy. The vegetarian springrolls were quite good and the flautas were fine. We got good reports from the upstairs neighbors on the frozen items we haven't eaten yet (beef turnovers and momos, which are a type of dumpling).
What didn't: Sadly for us, a 4-person box was not two 2-person boxes; they were larger portions that we had to manually split. This was fine for things like the turnovers and flautas, but less so for the various sauces.
There were a few items I would never have ordered, such as the caramel and cheese kettle corn (a mixture of the two, not a combination) - I don't care for popcorn. The koji will be interesting to try but it's not something I cared about getting. We could have done without any of the three sweets, actually. Cake pops? I ate one but eh, I wouldn't have missed it.
Other items were tasty enough, but it was work to use them up before they went bad and weren't the sort of thing we normally plan for meals (example: two sauces from Reem's).
Will we order again? I don't think so. It felt more like we were supporting a cause than getting food we wanted, and/or a reasonable value. Especially for things like sauces and popcorn.
La Cocina is an incubator for women starting small food-based businesses, primarily but not exclusively immigrants. They provide kitchen facilities to start out, help with business plans, and generally are a noble cause. They have a number of success stories such as Reem's. So when the curvy upstairs neighbor linked to their weekly quarantine variety box, we thought we'd try it.
Each week they have about 10 things from various alumnae businesses; all the proceeds go to the companies, so it's still helping support locals even if (most of them) aren't necessarily restaurants. They were sold out of the 2-person boxes, so we split a 4-person box with upstairs.
What worked: Pickup was quick and easy. The vegetarian springrolls were quite good and the flautas were fine. We got good reports from the upstairs neighbors on the frozen items we haven't eaten yet (beef turnovers and momos, which are a type of dumpling).
What didn't: Sadly for us, a 4-person box was not two 2-person boxes; they were larger portions that we had to manually split. This was fine for things like the turnovers and flautas, but less so for the various sauces.
There were a few items I would never have ordered, such as the caramel and cheese kettle corn (a mixture of the two, not a combination) - I don't care for popcorn. The koji will be interesting to try but it's not something I cared about getting. We could have done without any of the three sweets, actually. Cake pops? I ate one but eh, I wouldn't have missed it.
Other items were tasty enough, but it was work to use them up before they went bad and weren't the sort of thing we normally plan for meals (example: two sauces from Reem's).
Will we order again? I don't think so. It felt more like we were supporting a cause than getting food we wanted, and/or a reasonable value. Especially for things like sauces and popcorn.
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Date: 2020-04-23 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-25 01:24 pm (UTC)