The Ama-zing Story
of The Chef Amazing Food Corporation

The Chef Amazing Food Corporation was founded around 1948 (no one really remembers) by Amanda Zing, a woman with excellent taste, questionable patience and a name that seemed to have planned her career before she did.

Ms. Zing — known to employees as “Miss Zing” and to competitors as “that woman again” — believed that deciding what to make for dinner had become unnecessarily difficult.

She had also noticed something she considered a good deal more serious. People had stopped enjoying it. Dinner had become a thing to be got through, like a form to be filled in, and Amanda Zing regarded that as a failure of management rather than a fact of life.

People had food. They had kitchens. Some even had recipes. What they lacked was someone who could look at the whole situation and say, with confidence:

Here’s what we’re having.

So she hired a gifted but chronically overenthusiastic young cook whose legal name has long since been misplaced. Amanda called him Chef Amazing because, as she later explained, “It was more encouraging than what I had been calling him.”

Together, they established The Chef Amazing Food Corporation in a former umbrella factory with one desk, two saucepans and a telephone that only accepted incoming calls.

Two saucepans was exactly enough, because Amanda cooked two things. She made anchovy butter on toast and she made a potato and onion tortilla, both of them extremely well, and in forty years she never once added a third. “Two saucepans,” she said. “Two dishes. I saw no reason to expand.”

Amanda ran the company.
Chef Amazing handled dinner.

Their first product was not a product at all

It was an answer. Each afternoon, people telephoned the corporation and described what they had in the icebox, how much time they had and whom they were trying to impress. Chef Amazing proposed a meal. Amanda made sure he didn’t propose anything ridiculous.

Business grew quickly. By 1952, the company had reportedly answered the question “What’s for dinner?” more than 700,000 times — although Amanda later admitted that several hundred thousand of those answers had been “chicken.”

Over the decades, the corporation experimented with nearly every available technology. Recipes were delivered by telephone, telegram, mail, pneumatic tube and, during one regrettable summer, carrier pigeon.

The company’s enormous recipe archive included family favorites, restaurant secrets, handwritten index cards, meals for picky children, dinners for new romances and a heavily guarded file labeled:

THINGS TO COOK WHEN THE BOSS IS COMING

The file was four cards deep and never grew. It is reproduced here in full, for the first time, against Amanda’s stated wishes.

How he came to be called a superhero

The name was not the Corporation’s idea. On a Thursday in February 1954, a blizzard closed every road into the city and a good part of the country stayed home with whatever happened to be in the house. The switchboard lit up at four in the afternoon and did not go dark until the following morning.

Chef Amazing answered every call. Cabbage and a tin of anchovies. Half a chicken and no onions. A woman in the north of the state with nine guests, three pounds of potatoes and a husband she described as “no help whatsoever.” He worked through the night in an apron and a paper hat, and by breakfast the Corporation had put dinner on four thousand tables that had been ready to give up on the idea.

A columnist at the evening paper ran the story two days later under a headline the Corporation has never been able to shake:

THE “WHAT’S FOR DINNER” SUPER-HERO

Amanda thought it was ridiculous. She also had it framed.

The paper listed what it called his powers, and the Corporation has never found a reason to correct the list:

1. He can see inside your refrigerator. Legally, you have to tell him what’s in it, but the effect is the same.
2. He remembers every dinner you have ever had, and what you thought of it. He has never once brought up the meatloaf.
3. He knows what is good this month before the shop does.
4. He can feed a table of six holding four opinions, one allergy and a child who has recently renounced sauce.
5. He decides. Anyone can suggest. Deciding is the difficult part.

There was, briefly, a cape. It was presented at the 1955 company dinner, worn once, and retired the same evening after what the minutes record only as “the incident with the burner.” Amanda ruled on the matter the next morning and has never revisited it.

The apron stays.

He has never rescued anyone from a burning building. He would like that understood. What he rescues people from is twenty to seven on a Tuesday — the hour when the day is spent, the fridge is a series of unrelated objects and nobody at the table has an idea in their head.

Somebody has to say what’s for dinner.
He says it before you have to.

Amanda insisted the company follow four rules

1. Dinner should fit the life of the person making it.
2. A recipe is only useful if someone actually wants to cook it.
3. Chef Amazing may suggest flambé, but he may not supervise it by telephone.
4. If nobody enjoyed making it, it does not count as dinner.

Amanda has never explained the tiny crowned sardine tattoo on her wrist. Chef Amazing claims to know the story. Amanda says he does not. He will, however, make you sardines on toast with crushed tomato if you ask, and he will not be drawn on the subject while he does it.

Today

The Chef Amazing Food Corporation uses slightly more advanced machinery, but its purpose remains unchanged. Chef Amazing remembers what you like, knows what you have, understands how much time you’ve got and helps turn all of it into something worth eating.

Which was never really the point, and Amanda has said so in every annual letter since 1951. The Corporation was not founded to make dinner efficient. Efficiency is what people were already doing to it, and look where that got everybody.

It was founded to make dinner worth doing.

Amanda Zing remains Founder, Chairwoman and Chief Executive Officer. She is also still Chef Amazing’s boss.

Someone has to be.

THE SWITCHBOARD IS STILL OPEN