Weekly Meal Prep in Louisville, Cooked by a Private Chef

There are two kinds of meal prep in Louisville. The first kind counts your macros, seals chicken and rice into trays, and calls it dinner. The second kind is a chef cooking your week — real food, seasoned properly, different every week, waiting in your fridge when you get home. This page is about the second kind, because it is the kind I do.

How it works

Every week I cook 10 meals for you — two a day, five days — built around what you actually like to eat. Not a fixed menu you pick from a grid; a conversation. You tell me the household rules once (no beets, lighter on the garlic, somebody is training, somebody is picky), and I build the weeks from there.

For one: $299 per week for the cooking, plus groceries at cost — I shop, you reimburse the receipt, nothing marked up.
For two: $449 per week, same model.
That works out to roughly $30 a meal for one, $22 a meal for two — cooked by a chef who trained at the Culinary Institute of America and spent three years cooking in Tuscany.

Pause any week. Going out of town, fridge is full, life happened — say the word and that week does not happen. No lock-in, no contract, no guilt trip from a subscription page. This is an ongoing weekly service, and it stays because the food is good, not because canceling is hard.

What a week actually looks like

A recent client's week, to make it concrete:

Braised short rib with parmesan polenta and broccolini
Fried goat cheese and arugula salad with a smoked paprika honey vinaigrette
Tuscan herb chicken with white beans and greens
Handmade pasta with a slow ragù
Blackened redfish with crawfish cream
A soup worth eating — roasted pepper and tomato, finished properly
Eggs, salads, and grain bowls for the lighter meals, built fresh the same day

Nobody's week looks like anybody else's. One of my regulars eats like a trattoria; another wants steakhouse food with the portions watched; a third is a household of two with opposite tastes, which mostly means the sauces do the diplomacy.

Who this is for

Busy households where dinner keeps becoming takeout by default and nobody is happy about it.
Couples who eat well and want their weeknights back.
People coming home to an empty fridge after travel, work, or a hospital stay, who want the first week handled.
Anyone who has tried the tray services and learned that a week of identical chicken is a diet, not a dinner.

Who it is not for: if you want meals engineered to a macro split and priced at $7 a tray, Louisville has good services for that and I am not one of them. This is cooking, priced like cooking.

Getting started

Call (765) 461-3411 or email joemerchanthouse@gmail.com. Ten minutes: who is eating, what they love, what they avoid, any allergies.
First week is a trial by appetite. I cook a week; you eat it; we adjust. Too much food, too little, more pasta, fewer salads — the second week is always closer than the first.
Then it just runs. Invoices land on Mondays, due the same day. Groceries at cost, on the receipt. Pause whenever a week needs pausing.

FAQ

How many meals is it, exactly? Ten meals per week per person — two a day across five days. That covers weekday lunches and dinners for most people; weekends stay yours.

Why are groceries separate? Because your tastes set the grocery bill, not my spreadsheet. A week built on chicken and pasta costs less than a week built on steak and Gulf fish, and you should only pay for the week you chose. Receipts are passed through at cost.

Can you cook for dietary needs — low sodium, no spice, allergies? Yes, and this is where a chef beats a tray line. Low-sodium plates get seasoned in layers so they taste like food, not like a restriction. Allergies are built into the plan from the first week, not handled as substitutions.

Is there a contract or minimum number of weeks? No. Pause any week, stop whenever you like. The regulars stay because Tuesday's fridge makes them happy.

Do you deliver, or cook in my kitchen? Both arrangements exist among my regulars — a weekly cook in your kitchen, or a drop-off of the finished week. We settle it on the first call based on your schedule and your kitchen.

Want next week handled? Call (765) 461-3411 or email joemerchanthouse@gmail.com, or reach me through https://privatechefjoe.com. And if what you actually need is one great dinner instead of a whole week, see what a private chef costs in Louisville — in-home dinners start at $95 per person.