The doorbell rings and your hungry kids let out squeals of delight. Waiting outside is a smiling delivery person bearing a pretty silver package. Inside is an assortment of containers labeled “Beef Bourguignon,” “Baby Candied Carrots,” “Roasted Asparagus,” even “Chocolate Chip Cookies.” This isn’t your average pizza night— this is a fresh, wholesome, complete meal designed with every member of your family in mind—a la Susie’s Supper Club. Susie Cover, Claude Wasserstein, Marcia Mishaan, and Samantha Schweitzer are the four New York women behind this innovative food delivery service, launched in December 2008. Experienced and passionate foodies, they believe that no family, no matter how busy, time-stretched, or kitchen un-savvy, should have to forgo sitting down to a home-cooked meal at the end of the day. Their company’s mission is to deliver affordable, all-natural, and most of all, delicious dishes that appeal to everyone from parents on down to the littlest eater at the table to
your front door—all with just the click of a mouse.%uFFFD
Cover, the energetic chef
behind the enterprise (and the one who puts the “Susie” in “Susie’s
Supper Club”), has a flair for cooking meals that appeal to kids. “I aim
to start training children’s taste buds early so they know what the
good stuff tastes like,” she says. But she didn’t initially set out on a
culinary career track.
Cover comes from a theatrical family—her father was an actor who
played the role of Tom Willis on “The Jeffersons,” and her mom was a
dancer with American Ballet Theatre—so it felt natural to go into the
performing arts herself. After having majored in theater during college,
she went on to perform in Off-Broadway shows throughout the city in her
20s.
It was also
then that she began entertaining for friends, and discovered that she
had a knack and a passion for cooking. Soon after, she left acting and
started cooking professionally, both for a catering company and as a
personal chef.
Cover
found that her two loves had something in common. “Cooking is similar
to theater because you love the process of it,” she says. “It’s like
thinking about how to approach the part: You think about what the meal
is, whether it’s lunch for a family or a special dinner. Then you have
to plan the menu, and then you execute it, and then you get the
applause—you hope!”
It was while she was working as a personal chef to co-founder
Claude Wasserstein and her children, Jack (10), and Dash and Lucy (both
9) that Cover got the idea for the company. “I realized that a lot of
families could benefit from having a similar quality of food like this
prepared for them, but that a personal chef wasn’t an option for
everyone financially,” recalls Cover. She couldn’t think of any delivery
service that provided homemade, ingredientdriven, seasonal food for
kids as well as grown-ups, so using her years of experience meal
planning, grocery shopping and cooking, she decided to fill the gap.
Wasserstein loved the idea of bringing Cover’s food to other families.
“I really liked her approach to food, which is fun, healthy and very
wholesome, yet creative,” Wasserstein says. “She’s always looking for
new ideas and new combinations and new ways to mix flavors. She’s
constantly rethinking it.” The two women were joined by Mishaan,
Wasserstein’s good friend and mother to Nicholas (14) and Alexandra
(13), as well as Schweitzer, Wasserstein’s niece and mother to Margaux
(9 months), both of whom were familiar with Cover’s cooking after being
Wasserstein’s dinner guests. And with that, Susie’s Supper Club was
born. Today, the business serves up hundreds of meals per week,
delivering all over Manhattan and to most neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
Families place their orders online or by phone by 5 p.m. the day before
they want their food delivered, and the meal arrives during one of two
available time slots between 1 p.m. and 8 p.m., Monday through Friday.
The main courses average $10, sides average $6 and desserts average $5,
and the food lasts up to three to five days. Popular menu items include
turkey meatballs, chicken Milanese, polenta fries, spinach squares, and
pumpkin cupcakes. The meals are cooked by Cover and her team of chefs at
the company’s headquarters in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which consist of a
commercial kitchen and their offices side by side in a big, white, open
space.
Ingredients for Susie’s Supper Club meals are all-natural
and organic, and many of them come from a handful of local purveyors,
including Farm to Chef (farmtochefinc.com), Pierless Fish
(pierlessfish.com) and Satur Farms (saturfarms.com).
Cover’s
husband, Rick Field, owns the artisanal pickle company, Rick’s Picks,
and is a regular at the city’s greenmarkets, where Cover met several of
the farmers she now works with. Cover and her team firmly believe that
their service is not a luxury. “It doesn’t matter what economy you’re
in. It’s not something you should skimp on.” To that end, their prices
are reasonable and often the equivalent to ordering out. “It costs you
$30 to get Chinese food for a family of four,” Cover notes. “You can get
a dinner for four from Susie’s Supper Club for the same price.”
Combining
their talents to create a service they are passionate about is
something that has come naturally to the four friends. “We all bring
something different to the table and we all really enjoy each other’s
company and really respect each other,” says Schweitzer, who is Susie’s
Supper Club’s creative director, doing all of the design work from the
website to the brochures. “It’s nice to be part of a team working
towards a goal that is so easy to believe in.” The women hold regular
Thursday morning meetings, where they change up the menus and discuss
new ideas.
They have made a point to give back to local
organizations whose work is close to their hearts, donating food and
services to fundraisers for Central Park Conservancy, Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Baby Buggy, and NYU Child Study Center.
They
also share the enviable task of taste testing the menu items, which
change seasonally and are ever evolving. “I test recipes on my
children,” Mishaan says. “They will have friends over, and we taste and
critique new recipes that Susie’s Supper Club is trying, and the
teenagers add feedback.”
The founders pay close attention to
what their customers have to say. “We
have one particular teenager who orders, and if she doesn’t like
something, she’ll let you know. She’ll tell you if it’s too lemony or
not lemony enough,” Mishaan says. “So that’s good. We want people to
give us their honest opinions. It helps us because we’re really
listening and we will tweak the recipes.”
The service gets
plenty of glowing feedback as well, and that, Cover says, makes all the
hard work feel worth it. “The joy comes when you’re in the middle of
doing something and an email pops up from one of the clients about how
much they loved it. And then you go, ‘Ok, that’s why I do all this.’
That’s the joy.”
Over
the years, Cover has learned a lot about getting kids to eat nutritious
meals. Last month she was featured on the TV show, “The View,” offering
tips and recipes for cooking kid-friendly meals. While she says she is
firmly against “dumbing down” meals in an attempt to get kids to eat
(you won’t find her cutting food into silly shapes), Cover does believe
in making her dishes attractive to children. “The first thing they do is
see it,” she says. “You want to do things that are visually appealing
to kids so they don’t run away.” Kids may not try sauces with big chunks
of veggies or green herbs, but if they’re mixed into a smooth sauce
that has great flavor, they’re more likely to at least raise their fork.
Cover also
believes it’s important to educate kids about what they eat, although
she admits it’s not always a good idea to tell kids about every
ingredient in a dish before it goes down. “I would say, ‘Guess what’s in
there that you loved— you’ll never believe it! That’s grass-fed beef
and it comes from only a few miles from here.’” Another tip from Cover:
Don’t give up on teaching kids how to eat well. Just as parents tell
children to say “Please” and “Thank you” for years until it becomes
second nature, they should feed kids a variety of healthy foods so that
when they go to friends’ houses or to restaurants, they know how to make
the right choices.
Parents who order from Susie’s find it easy
to know exactly what’s going into each dish—labels contain simple,
recognizable ingredients like broccoli, lemon juice, olive oil, and salt
and pepper. After all, Cover’s philosophy is that if you can’t
pronounce it, you probably shouldn’t eat it. Nutritional information for
every dish is listed on their website as well. “Unlike a lot of
delivery services or take-out, you’re getting top-quality ingredients,
organic produce and natural, grass-fed beef,” says Mishaan. “You could
actually eat this every day and be healthy. It’s as if you were at home
cooking it yourself.”
So what’s next for Susie’s Supper Club?
Now that Cover is expecting twins, she says the menu could possibly
expand to include baby food. They’ve also recently signed on with
Citibabes in Scarsdale to run their café and are talking about writing
cookbooks featuring their recipes as well. But firmly growing their base
of Manhattan and Brooklyn families is their top priority right now.
After only seven months in business, they seem to be well on their way.
Cover says her secret to supper club success is no big secret—she just
loves food. “I think about food all the time,” she says. “I think
success comes from loving it.”
“To
me, feeding your family nutritious, healthy, organic, and all-natural
food is not luxurious. It’s just a way of life,” says Cover.
