Mamazuofan: Shanghai home chefs get cooking

Think back to the last time you had a major food craving. Maybe it was for a turkey and avocado sandwich on crusty baguette, or a dozen macarons, fresh out of the oven, but either way, it was probably for something you weren't cooking -- but maybe someone else in Shanghai was.

Enter Mamazuofan.com, a new website that's letting Shanghaining take advantage of the city’s diversity to eat food from all over the world -- without restaurant prices, or pulling out a recipe book themselves.

If you cook it, will they order?

Mamazuofan.com, which roughly translates to "mama cooks food," is the brainchild of Julien Chiavassa and Arnaud Le Regent. Chiavassa and Le Regent are French entrepreneurs and Shanghai home chefs who were fed up with some local offerings that didn’t quite hit the spot. That delicious looking spaghetti bolognese? It's so often made with Ketchup, not tomato sauce -- and made a website to hook up foodies with the people who can feed them well.

Shanghai-based entrepreneur Arnaud Le Regent, not only helped create Mamzuofan, but isn't a bad chef himself.

On the site, about 15 to 20 portions of food are exchanged every week, according to Le Regent, who heads the technical side.

The service is free, and the transactions are simple: amateur Shanghai chefs can sign up for an account on the site, whip up their best home cooking, and wait for diners to ring their doorbell, pay, and pick up the food.

You can search for dishes being made in your district, follow a chef that you like and leave comments on what you've eaten. Around 85 percent of the users are expats, while the remaining 15 percent are local Chinese.

Although many of the site’s users are Shanghai home chefs, it's not all amateur cooks; a few savvy businesses, such as the Hilton and Amelia's Jams, are listed on the site too.

Safety first

With all the issues concerning food safety in China lately, it seems an obvious concern for a site dealing mainly with Shanghai home chefs.

“It's a consumer to consumer website,” explains Chiavassa. “We can't control the sellers or the market. We depend on the community to ‘level up’ the site, leaving comments and altering us and other users to problems."

Not exactly an exact science, but Chiavassa says he does make a point to try every new dish offered on the site.

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 “At the end of the day, if someone has a bad experience, then they leave a review and no one will buy from this cook,” Chiavassa continues.

“We will also investigate any allegations of food poisoning, though we haven't had one yet. As soon as you have, say, 30 recommendations for a certain cook, then the fear of hygiene or safety issues falls away. Mamazuofan's survival is linked to the credibility of the food and the chef, and a single case of food poisoning can kill our growth. We realize that.”

Nova Ruan ("Nova" on Mamazuofan.com), is a baker who's transitioning from amateur to professional.

A former events manager with a natural disposition to bake, compounded by her travels through Europe with her Italian husband, she's currently staying home to take care of her newborn child, and making desserts in the meantime.

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Ruan sells her baked goods on Taobao and Mamazuofan.

“I want to open a cake shop,” she explains, “and Mamazuofan is a good way for me to do my market research.”

“For example," she continues, "I've put macaroons on my Taobao site and I sold nothing, though my traditional cakes sold well. But, when I put macaroons on Mamazuofan, I sold several orders in a week. So now I know: if open my shop in a Chinese area, I will sell cream cakes; if I open in a foreign area, I'll sell macaroons.”

Mamazuofan.com is about personal enjoyment, and the enjoyment of food, and that's what we wanted to share with the rest of Shanghai.

— Julien Chiavassa, Mamazuofan co-founder

Even though she knows that the Mamazuofan model has flaws, Ruan supports the website's model.

"Mamazuofan is a great idea, but it requires a degree of trust,” Ruan continues. “I bake a cake, but I can only hope that the person who reserved it will pick it up and pay for it. If not, I lose money. It's not like Taobao, where the person has already paid and there's a guarantee.”

Test run

We decided to try out Mamazuofan for ourselves by ordering a serving of pork cari, a dish described by the home chef and user "floO" as a "traditional dish of Réunion, a French-speaking island near Madagascar."

During our registration and ordering, the website was relatively easy to use. We ordered our dish and few nights later, we showed up at an apartment in Xujiahui where the tomatoes, spices and pork were bubbling away on the stove.

Our cook was kind enough to lend us Tupperware (usually, you bring your own to pick up the food) and we paid RMB 25 for the tasty, home-cooked pork cari, rice and a spicy raw tomato and onion salad to go with it.

The cari was a delicious dinner, and at RMB 25 it's one of the cheapest Western meals we've had in Shanghai.

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All in all, Mamazuofan is an intriguing idea, and a new way to meet your neighbor -- in Shanghai, that could be anyone from any part of the world -- and to make a connection through food.

“We love the business model,” says Chiavassa. “Mamazuofan.com is about personal enjoyment, and the enjoyment of food, and that's what we wanted to share with the rest of Shanghai.”