Leave Cooking Hassles to the Team at Home Cuisine

Imagine these situations: You’re a professional with a jam-packed daily schedule, and cooking dinner is the last thing you want to do when you get home. Or perhaps you’re a senior who wants to maintain independence and avoid assisted living, though your kids worry about you cooking every night. Maybe you’re aiming to shed a few pounds and wish you had a personal chef to make it easier. You want your meals to be nutritious, fresh and healthy, but the thought of studying ingredients, counting calories, shopping, and cooking is overwhelming.

This is where St. Matthews-based Home Cuisine steps in. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Home Cuisine was established to offer clients the convenience of a personal chef. The meals are both delicious and healthy, with calorie counts already calculated, leaving customers with the simple task of heating and eating.

The concept is straightforward, but surprisingly, no one had thought of it locally before Louisville foodie Sandy Pike had her eureka moment in 2004, when her sister faced health issues and couldn’t cook. Thus, Home Cuisine was born, emphasizing locally sourced, nutritious meals delivered to customers’ homes or convenient pickup points at all Rainbow Blossom stores.

Making it easy is just part of the mission. Sandy emphasizes that taste and quality are paramount.

“Our food is clean and tastes great,” she says. “Food prepared long in advance, like the national brands, needs preservatives to stay fresh, so our meals are delivered just hours after preparation. That local, fresh twist allows us to offer a product that can’t be touched by big-box services cranking out thousands of frozen meals from a warehouse somewhere.”

The idea quickly proved successful, and within a few years, Sandy’s daughter, Mae Pike, returned from wedding planning in Florida to handle marketing, allowing her to focus on the culinary side. Over time the company expanded its offerings from just daily meals in two calorie ranges to various meal plans, including family-size dinners that Mae calls “a godsend for busy families who are tired of ordering pizza or hitting the drive-through.”

Subsequent additions have been equally popular, including holiday dinners, Derby brunches and dinners, and three-day cleanses, offered monthly.

“Thanksgiving went wild and has been our busiest week of the year for a long time,” Sandy reports. “It turns out that having a fully prepared, traditional turkey-and-all-the-classic-trimmings dinner, delivered to your door, is really popular in Louisville.”

“Who wants to fool with cooking when friends and family are around?” Mae notes. “We do the hard part for you.”

With the company’s growth, the Pikes recognized the need for more hands on deck. Mae’s husband, Allen McKamie, left his career in hospitality management to become the CEO, while her sister, Elizabeth Kristofek, a certified holistic nutritionist, took charge of health and nutritional basics.

“We were so lucky to woo Allen and Elizabeth to Home Cuisine at a time of so much growth,” Sandy says. “Allen has a strong business background and helped us build our operations in ways that Mae and I always struggle with. Elizabeth has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of nutrition, and has pioneered the 3-Day Reboot as well as answering our nitpicky questions all day long. Plus, it’s nice having all of this youthful energy in the office. I absolutely love these kids!”

Lately, Home Cuisine has also grown an impressive wholesale division, pioneered by McKamie. “We prepare products for local institutions, following their recipes, to be packaged as their resale, and it works out really well,” McKamie explains. “We also provide bulk meals for local institutions that need to offer meals for their staff or clients, but don’t want the expense or hassle of a full-tilt kitchen. The feedback has been really positive and we look forward to expanding.”

The company’s latest innovation is Dinner Party in a Box, which caters to those who love entertaining, but not the planning and cooking.

“We’re inviting customers to imagine dinner in Paris with a French menu, Charleston with Lowcountry fare, and San Francisco with the menu planned around an evening in North Beach,” Mae says. “And the concept is evolving; now we’re developing a wonderful Local Dinner Party in a Box, featuring classic Kentucky regional delicacies, that we hope to introduce late this fall. Online ordering makes it a breeze to host a lovely party without scrubbing one pot. What a great time to crack out the fine china and actually enjoy your guests!”

So far, Dinner Party in a Box has been well-received. That’s not a surprise, Mae says. “To test the meals, we pulled them out of my mother’s refrigerator for Pike family gatherings. The menus were so effective that everyone raved – and it was nice knowing that mom had been relaxing that day, not running around making all of us dinner. My family is a tough audience and everyone was impressed.”

The reputation they now enjoy, Mae adds, has been a group effort. “We’ve been blessed with an amazing staff,” she says. “To name a few, Kathy Robinson, our kitchen manager, came to us in our panic during the pandemic, and we were so lucky to keep her. Chip McPherson is truly one of the most gifted chefs. I learn something from him every time I am in the kitchen. He’s an old friend; we met at Deitrich’s in the ’90s when I was a server and he was the chef. After years of begging on bended knee, he finally agreed to come work with us, and our food has never been better. He makes me so proud of our product.”

Although the business started modestly, with just one employee and a tight budget, its success was no accident. Sandy’s previous ventures provided plenty of experience. She founded Jack Fry’s and turned it into a favorite in Louisville before selling it in 1986. Then she created Cafe Society in what is now NuLu, and Louisville’s first dessert cafe, The Queen of Tarts, proving her ability to identify and fill a niche market. Then came Home Cuisine, which she launched by renting a small corner in the kitchen at the Mayan Café, which remains a family favorite.

“Now we have this huge commissary in St. Matthews,” Sandy marvels. “I never imagined this growth, but I’m proud we’ve made it here.”

“I’m so proud of my mother and her accomplishments,” Mae adds. “In the 1980s she was doing things that no one else in town had thought of, and with her drive and talent, she broke so many glass ceilings. She just seemed to be writing, or rewriting, the rules as she went along. I’ve learned this entire business from her, and I love to brag about her.”

Sandy, meanwhile, is looking ahead. She sees a gradual transfer of leadership to the next generation, with Mae, Allen and Elizabeth poised to ensure the company’s future.

And Mae’s passion mirrors her mother’s. “We get up every day to hear stories of people getting off their blood pressure meds, no longer being prediabetic, reducing their medication – or just that we make things easier for them,” Mae says. “It’s immensely rewarding to know our meals make such a difference in people’s lives.”