Taking Out, Eating In

By Mimi Sheraton

* Manufacturers of major appliances, beware! Purveyors of pots and pans, pay heed! Home cooking may be on the verge of obsolescence. Long the gleaming altar of the household, the great American kitchen could soon resemble a deserted mining town in Colorado. Any minute now, the tumbleweed may roll in.

Or perhaps the kitchen will be turned to other uses entirely. "I'd like to put a treadmill in mine and use it as an exercise room," said a busy real estate agent who was buying her take-out dinner at Grace's Marketplace in New York City. It is just such foods -- and such satisfied shoppers -- that are responsible for the current flight from the stove. Eighty-one percent of American households buy take-out food within each four-week period, according to a study for the Food Marketing Institute and the Campbell Soup Co. These buyers are about as likely to be men as to be women, mostly between the ages of 18 and 54, and they tend to belong to all but the lowest income levels.

The appeal of easy, fresh food is not hard to understand. Exhausted by daily schedules that include work and working out, tired and hungry wage earners crave the instant satisfaction of ready-made meals. Even the hassle of restaurants is too much for the weariest workers, who prefer the barefoot comforts of home. Some may make the effort to arrange the dinner on a plate and eat at a set table, but many, if not most, just dip plastic forks into foil or Styrofoam containers and collapse in front of the TV screen.

At its most familiar and plebeian, take-out means pizza, chicken or burgers from fast-food chains, or a Chinese or Mexican meal -- or, of course, frozen or vacuum-bagged fodder from the supermarket. But these days there is a huge variety of fresh take-out food for the weary shopper. Many supermarkets offer wide menus that include not only kaleidoscopic salad bars but also many tony dishes just cooked in-house. The newly spruced-up Rice Epicurean Market in Houston offers roasted Cornish hens and beef Wellington, and it will steam lobsters to order as a customer goes about other shopping. The menu at the seven Treasure Island supermarkets in the Chicago area ranges from Greek spinach pie to fried chicken and ribs, turkey with gravy and mashed potatoes, and beef brisket. The Giant Food chain has responded to the growing market by setting up Gourmet to Go sections in 30 of its 144 stores in Maryland, Virginia and Washington.

At two to three times the price of comparable homemade dishes, the fare is hardly cheap, but customers feel that convenience and the ability to buy only the amount needed for a single meal are worth the cost. There is stiff competition between take-out sources, so much so that last year New York's D'Agostino chain hired a graduate chef from the Culinary Institute of America to oversee its new prepared-food operation. With such talent, D'Agostino hopes to whet the appetites -- and curiosity -- of New Yorkers accustomed to such entrenched take-out sources as Balducci's, Grace's Marketplace and upscale supermarkets. Raley's in Northern California, out to trim fat profits from local Chinese restaurants, placed five chefs at a hot-wok counter to stir-fry such wonders as Peking ribs and kung pao chicken.

The purveyors of take-out food do not always do their own cooking. Although most ready-to-eat dishes are made in store kitchens or in large central commissaries of supermarket chains, some take-out food departments shop at other sources. They may buy ethnic specialties to supplement their own production or pour prepared soup into electrified tureens or, like Fairway in New York City, buy everything ready-made. What they offer is, in fact, retaken-out meals.

Despite the advantages of convenience foods, there are some sobering negatives. No longer will family members come home to the warmly reassuring aromas of dinner simmering on the stove. And diverse though the array of take- out foods may be, inevitably there seems to be a sameness -- the endless curls and squiggles of cold pastas, the curried or dilled chicken salads and the pans of wilting zucchini and string beans swimming in oil. Then there is the dominant flavor -- call it take-out -- owing perhaps to bottled dressings or sauces underseasoned to appeal to the mass palate. Gone are the idiosyncratic subtleties of family recipes.

But perhaps there is cause for hope. Many people who buy take-out food on workdays take to the stove on special occasions. "I cook for out-of-town friends or when my boyfriend comes over," says Gerri Brownstein, 25, a New York advertising-sales representative. Brownstein may be remembering an observation made by Thomas Wolfe. "There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves," he wrote in The Web and the Rock. Somehow, the act of reheating dinner seems a lot less appealing.

With reporting by JoAnn Lum/New York, with other bureaus