Virtual restaurant Funeral Potatoes puts twist on classic Midwest dish
CHICAGO (CBS) -- For this week's Foodie Friday, one virtual restaurant is putting a twist on modern midwestern fare.
It's a cheesy potato casserole native to Midwest culture—something you might bring over to a neighbor in a time of need.
That homey, neighborly, homecooked goodness is the whole vibe, and that's why they've aptly named themselves Funeral Potatoes.
On Tuesdays, Eve Studnicka and Alexis Thomas-Rice have a lot of grocery shopping to do.
"We like, meet together. We make our separate lists for our separate dishes, spend like four to six hours shopping and putting groceries away," Thomas-Rice said.
For the past four years, these two have developed multi-course menus nearly every week, turning out anywhere from 30 to 50 servings at a time as a no-contact, delivery-only, virtual restaurant, Funeral Potatoes.
"We're both from small towns in the Midwest. We know the value of a neighbor bringing over a casserole," Studnicka said.
At this rate, it seems like they're neighbors with the entire city– and in some ways, that's not too far off from being true.
"Sometimes, would be doing 30 deliveries a day, and it would literally be from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. We'd be driving like 70 miles a day," Thomas-Rice said.
"So we're working in bulk. Yeah, but we can get it done pretty efficiently because I think we've just had so much practice. We're on our 180th menu now," Studnicka said.
The menu looks a whole lot different than their first, from the staff to the scale, even down to working in their first formal kitchen.
"Our first legal one. Yeah. We had no intention of, like, really having longevity. We just started as a way to, like, pay our bills," Thomas-Rice said.
"It was the pandemic. We lost our jobs on the same day, and we were trying to figure out how to make some money to cover rent for a couple months, and we both had food jobs," Studnicka said.
Neither Studnicka nor Thomas-Rice were strangers to the food industry. They'd run the gauntlet of jobs - six of which they worked with one another. So when Studnicka decided to start selling soup to her sick friends and Instagram followers out of the lobby of her apartment ...
"I thought that was such a good idea. We could probably do this bigger," Thomas-Rice said.
She knew a good idea when she saw it, and her background in event catering came along with a cooler and a van— more than enough to get the ball rolling.
"It kind of started off with a bang. I think we expected like ten, 12 orders. i think the very first week, we had like 48. We were overwhelmed," Thomas-Rice said.
Almost immediately, the two found themselves in the kitchen until 2 a.m., scraping and squeezing for more freezer and storage space.
"It was so much bigger of an operation than we thought. I was literally delivering things in Trader Joe's bags," Thomas-Rice said.
"it was a trial by fire. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I can't believe we decided that we wanted to keep doing it," Studnicka said.
Now, their operation is far larger, with their own bags, staff, and kitchen space.
"We want to be able to provide an experience that's nourishing and comforting to our neighbors who might be going through a hard time or who might be, you know, who just need to have something taken off their plate," Thomas-Rice said.
Or, rather, have something left on their doorstep.