Why Cook4Me exists

There is a woman in Peckham who has been cooking egusi for twenty years. Her neighbours know. Her church knows. Three WhatsApp groups know. Nobody else does, and she has no way to change that.

That is not a cooking problem. Her cooking is not in question — it is the reason anyone is asking. It is an infrastructure problem. To take a booking from a stranger she would need a way to prove she is who she says she is, a way to show her kitchen meets the standard, a way to take money that does not depend on either party simply trusting the other, and a way to be found by someone who has never met her.

Every one of those exists for a restaurant. None of them existed for her.

So the food stayed inside the WhatsApp groups. And the people who wanted it — the student in Manchester who has not had proper jollof since leaving home, the family hosting forty people for a naming ceremony, the couple who simply want dinner cooked properly in their own kitchen — went without, or settled for a reheated approximation from a kitchen that has never made it before.

Cook4Me is deliberately narrow. We are not a restaurant, we do not employ the chefs, and we do not write the menus. We do four things, and we try to do them properly.

We verify. Before a chef can take a booking, we check their identity, their address, their Level 2 Food Hygiene certificate, their allergen training, their public liability insurance and their local-authority food registration. Documents go to a human, not a regex. A chef who cannot produce them does not appear on the site. The full list is here.

We hold the money.When you book, your payment goes into escrow — not to the chef. It is released after you confirm the meal arrived and was what you ordered. If it was not, the money is still ours to refund, not someone else’s to return.

We handle the admin. Bookings, deposits, schedules, messages, delivery, receipts, tax records. The work that stops a good cook from running a business.

We take as little as we can. The chef keeps 90% of their food price. Every fee is listed on one page, because a marketplace that is vague about its cut is telling you something.

We do not standardise recipes. We do not tell a chef their stew needs less pepper for a British palate, or ask them to put a lighter version on the menu. We do not rank cuisines, and we do not pick which ones are allowed — chefs propose the cuisines and dishes they cook, and we add them.

The authenticity is not a feature we added. It is what happens when nobody interferes.

We also do not inflate ourselves. We launched recently and we are small. You will not find a chef count, a star rating or a list of cities on this site until those numbers are real, because the two things we can prove — escrow on every payment, and 90% to the chef — are worth more than six we cannot.

Cook4Me was founded by Godswill Atasie, and is built and run by a small team in the UK.

Cook4Me is a brand of Livora Limited, a company registered in England and Wales (No. 16295343), with its registered office at 20 Wenlock Road, London N1 7GU. We are not a side project of a larger platform and we are not venture-funded; we are a small team building one thing.

If something here is wrong, or you want to ask us something this page does not answer, write to us. A person reads it.