Bites By Bre Delivers Date Night and Weekly Meals to Your Home
Bre Goldsmith’s three-course Date Night Delivered special packages are an at-home twist on her Friday night pop-up dinners.
Bites By Bre is date night delivered. Photo by Jamie Coelho.
Becoming a full-time chef and business owner was a happy accident for Bre Goldsmith. Now she’s running Bites By Bre meal delivery service featuring her own recipes she cooks with sous chef Jacob Rosen each week, plus small catering opportunities and date night delivery.
The weekly meal delivery service has helped many people and families who might not have time to cook due to demanding jobs, who just want to eat healthier, or for whatever reason, aren’t comfortable going to a grocery store for food. She creates eight healthy meals for customers to reheat each week, and every participant gets the same lineup of dishes delivered right to their door. She cooks international cuisine featuring elevated dishes that take it to the next level using quality ingredients.
“It’s meant for people who want to eat adventurously and have fun unboxing every week,” Goldsmith says. “People say it’s like Christmas morning when the food comes. Families with kids also love that the meals expose their children to international flavors.”
Goldsmith’s Date Night Delivered special packages are a twist on her pre-COVID-19 “In the Round” Friday night pop-up dinners, when twenty-six guests would arrive at her space located in a round, historic building for a three-course dinner party filled with conversation with both friends and strangers. Date Night Delivered is a way to share similar elevated menus from these events, but enjoyed in her customers’ homes. Place an order by Thursday at 5 p.m. for Friday delivery or pickup.
Each Date Night Delivered package includes a different three-course meal dropped to your door with a bouquet of fresh flowers on Friday nights, or you can schedule a pickup time at the commercial kitchen on Friday evenings. The most recent one involved a cucumber-tomato farro salad, Korean beef bulgogi tacos with locally made Chi Kitchen kimchi slaw and sticky rice with salted caramel cream, honeyed mangoes and a brown butter crust for dessert. Many couples and singles are ordering the upscale meal as a positive way to end their work week. Or there’s also an option to buy a meal for a frontliner for a 20 percent discount. If you’re not comfortable with restaurant dining yet, it’s a great way to orchestrate a special night at home.
“I’ve been so completely warmed by fans who’ve written about ways they’ve made ‘date night’ special, by dressing up in cocktail attire, bringing out the fine china, writing love notes to a partner who is quarantined at a separate residence (with date night on Zoom), etc.,” Goldsmith says. “We even had a couple celebrate their fifteenth wedding anniversary with us! But, perhaps the most memorable is a nurse who said that Fridays have become her weekly gift to herself…something bright to look forward to at the end of the long work week.”
Goldsmith even helped one couple who had to be quarantined separately and wanted to find a way to celebrate after their vacation to exotic destinations was canceled due to the pandemic. Goldsmith planned an international menu for the couple to mirror the different destinations where they had been scheduled to visit, while the woman in the relationship printed a fake passport and plane tickets and set up digital visits over Zoom to places where they were supposed to travel paired with the dishes from Bites by Bre.
Goldsmith founded Bites By Bre meal delivery service and catering company a few years after a spur-of-the-moment decision to pinch hit for a chef who had to cancel a dinner. At the time, in 2014, she had been working retail at the Olive Tap olive oil shop in Providence’s Wayland Square. She took on the retail job at the olive oil shop in addition to a career in marketing communications, just to fill her time with something fun that was food-related.
At the Olive Tap, people could taste test different olive oils and balsamic vinaigrettes on site before purchasing products. The specialty shop also hosted a Friday night tasting series, for which they hired revolving guest chefs to create bites and meals that incorporated the olive oils and vinaigrettes into the dishes. All of a sudden, Goldsmith was thrust into the spotlight in a last-minute jam.
“I had one training shift and I got a call from the owner, Greg Holtkamp, on my day off and he’s like, ‘Bre, I am really in a bind here. I don’t know what to do. We have this dinner on Friday and we had fifty people RSVP, and the chef just called out. I know that you said in your interview that you like to cook. Is there a chance in hell that you could come in and execute this menu?’”
Goldsmith pondered the offer, then quickly agreed and made a trip to Whole Foods to purchase ingredients. Previously, she had only cooked for up to six people for her own birthday party. That night, she executed the menu for fifty and left the owner impressed. “He came up to me, totally deadpan (he was a former army ranger), and he said, ‘Well, you rocked it. What are you doing next week?’”
She accepted the challenge, and each week for the next three years, she came up with her own menu to feed the crowd on a tight budget. “I leaned into ethnic cuisine. I thought about things that you can really elevate using humble ingredients,” she says. “That was my bootcamp. That’s how I learned to cook.”
Soon, guests were dropping hints that she should open a restaurant because they wanted her meals more than just on Friday nights. But opening a restaurant was the farthest thing from Goldsmith’s mind. When others spoke up and said they had family members who could use someone to cook healthy meals, her ears perked up. She started off with just one client, who told friends, and word spread from there. Meanwhile, she was still working in marketing communications, doing fashion and styling and designing websites.
Once she had enough clients to sustain Bites By Bre, she was able to leave that marketing communications world behind and focus only on her business. Making food for people makes her so happy, she says it’s not about the money. “In my soul, I’m getting paid more than I ever have in my life,” she says.
The cost of Date Night Delivered is $38 per person. Weekly meal plans vary. 11-17 Aleppo St., Providence, 401-829-9313, bitesbybre.com
