Real chefs bring restaurant quality food to Sydney offices with new food business Hungry Mondays via innovation company Idea Gallery

Hungry Mondays is a new food company in Sydney, created by Innovation company Idea Gallery, that uses top chefs to slow cook restaurant quality food for busy people to take home

The idea is a solution to a problem most top restaurants face early in the week; how to survive when they aren’t busy?

Click here to visit Hungry Mondays’ Facebook page.

The idea was to use restaurant chefs and their amazing kitchen facilities once the doors were closed, to slow cook gourmet meals for busy people to take home the next day.

Due to it’s popularity early in the week, it was called ‘Hungry Mondays’.

In the first week 60 meals were made and placed on Facebook, selling out in hours. Six months later the company now produce between one and two thousand meals each week that are sold from Monday to Wednesday.

The meals are delivered to offices or can be picked up at any number of their nine ‘pick up spots’ around Sydney. Bars like ‘The Hollywood Hotel’ in Surry Hills or even bookstores like ‘Berkelouw Books’, who welcome the footfall to their business on an otherwise quiet week night.

Says John Kane, co-founder of Idea Gallery: “Hungry Mondays is most importantly an excellent product, it started as a solution for restaurants all over Sydney but soon began to solve an even bigger problem for people; the bad fast food they have to eat each week.”

By cooking their meals for a minimum of 10 hours, they’ve dubbed the concept ‘slow cooked fast food’ and it seems taking on traditional fast food is exactly what Idea Gallery and Hungry Mondays intend to do.

Says Omar Andrade, head chef and CEO: “What we are is a good dinner solution that is slow cooked at the hands of quality chefs who are used to plating up $30 dishes, but we do it for $9.”

Andrade, an experienced chef who has worked at Billy Kwong, Pier and later his own restaurant El Capo, is joined by partners Hendrik Vogelzang, an ex-Pendolino chef and Hans Christian Berents, an ex-Droga5 creative. Not bad help if you can get it.

Appearing in places like this month’s GQ Magazine, SMH ‘Good Food’ and even last week’s London Metro newspaper, it won’t be long until Hungry Mondays appears on your plate.

Says Kane: “It was also one of the ideas that was a big hit at the show we did in London last week with Contagious. John Hegarty and Steve Henry came along. Or Sir John as people were calling him.”

Hungry Mondays is the second Sydney based company to launch with Idea Gallery this year. To see Hungry Mondays get slowly made each week, visit them on Facebook.

(Pictured: Omar Andrade, Hendrik Vogelzang)