Would you order takeout from the apartment next door?
Hundreds of New Yorkers are. Homemade, a new app that launched last month, connects industrious home cooks with adventurous eaters hungry to buy cookies and curries from strangers.
Simon Bowden, 63, is a creative director at a Manhattan advertising agency — and a baker.
In his 10-by-8-foot kitchen on the Upper East Side, he whips up fresh loaves of sourdough that are eagerly snapped up by Homemade users.
“It’s fun [making] bread and giving it to your friends and family,” says Bowden, who makes four loaves at a time several days a week and sells them for $10 to $12 each, just enough to cover ingredients. “But someone purchasing it from you — a stranger — and eating it and liking it and then buying it again, is quite exciting and different.”
Bowden is one of about 150 amateur chefs in the tri-state area using Homemade. The platform was cooked up by Nick Devane, 24, and Mike Dee, 25, who previously owned a downtown coffee shop together.
Wannabe chefs apply to the app via an online form, and the two men review their qualifications.
Once on the app, cooks can post a dish, the price and the time it will be ready. Customers pay a 9 percent fee to Homemade, on top of a food’s list price.
Devan and Dee ask if chefs have a food handler’s license, caterer’s license or USDA-certified kitchen, but they do not require them.
The New York City Health Department, which was not familiar with Homemade, says in a statement, “New Yorkers are welcome to prepare meals for friends and family, but not sell them to the public.”
Devane insists that the app is “completely legal” and they’re “working with some folks” to figure out how to best regulate safety.
Users don’t seem to mind the potential health code violations.
“You’d be surprised how many people trust you,” says Nicole Russell, 43, a multimedia designer who sells pizzas on Homemade.
She first started making pies in 2012 for construction workers fixing her neighborhood after Hurricane Sandy.
Now, she’s turned it into a profitable side hustle. Her Last Dragon Pizza nets her about $250 a week via Homemade — despite the fact that, like most cooks on the app, she doesn’t deliver. Hungry users trek from Queens and Manhattan to Russell’s home in the Rockaways to pick-up pizzas.
Freelance fashion designer Shari Hershon — who’s worked for Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein — says she’s not raking in the dough selling handmade s’mores and fortune cookies, but she still loves it.
“To be able to do have a second career and pursue a passion, it’s been really great,” says the 57-year-old wife and mother, who bakes out of her Chelsea loft.
But there’s only so much space in city kitchens, as Bowden’s learned. “[My wife] gets a little concerned when I’m buying 50-pound sacks of flour,” he says. “She looks at me like, ‘Are you crazy? In an NYC apartment?’”