With restaurants shut and unlikely to draw the same kind of exuberant customers as they did in a pre-Covid world — at least for some time — where is middle India’s next fine dining fix going to come from? The answer may be gourmet delivery services started by chefs and restaurateurs who want to utilise existing capacities and create at least some revenue to pay staff wages while giving diners the option to order food created by top talent.In Mumbai, chef Prateek Sadhu and restaurateur Adit Dugar , whose restaurant Masque had been awarded Asia’s 50 Best One to Watch, have announced that the restaurant’s kitchen will be open soon for takeaways and deliveries. “I am planning to do Kashmiri food… these are very tough times. We paid our staff for March but now we have to do something to continue,” says chef Sadhu.Chef-led food delivery services had started appearing in the metros even before Covid, but now they’re hoping to tap into a market that is looking for more than the food churned out by ubiquitous cloud kitchens.Iktara, a new food delivery started by The Table’s Gauri Devidayal and Jay Yousuf in collaboration with chef Amninder Sandhu in February is operational in south Mumbai with a menu that mixes comfort and exotica. Dishes like kulche, beetroot tikki, murgh malai tikka and Sandhu Saab’s chicken (the chef’s special white chicken butter masala) are on the menu alongside more unusual dishes like gosht ka halwa, Sandhu’s take on a courtly recipe (minced meat is boiled in salt water, fried in ghee with khoya and scented with cardamom, rose water, saffron to create the exotic dish). The menu is available on Scootsy, Zomato and Swiggy.In Delhi, chef Mohammed Ahsan Ali Qureshi, son of the legendary Imtiaz Qureshi, has teamed up with three childhood friends (with backgrounds in marketing, finance and investment banking) to launch Cross Border Kitchens, a “multi-brand internet-driven food and beverage company,” as he calls it. Of the seven delivery brands the company owns, one is dubbed Irfan Bhai, offering Lucknawi food the Qureshi family is synonymous with — from paya-nahari to makhmali (velvety) qorma. Another, called Biryani Central, ups the ante with dum cooking.Caterer and restaurateur Varun Tuli, whose delivery brand Noshi delivers dim sum, sushi, quinoa bowl meals, wok and curry meals in Delhi’s Greater Kailash Part 1 and Gurgaon, says there is an added focus on hygiene. “Our kitchens are large and open, food is packaged in multiple layers and not handled by anyone other than the chef. All delivery staff we hire have their own vehicles. All these are important factors for customers today, seeking assurance about hygiene and safety,” Tuli says.How customers in the metros respond to these remains to be seen but entrepreneur Karan Tanna, founder of Ghost Kitchens, is confident that high-quality deliveries are the way to go. “Food tech aggregators were losing money in the past because the cost of delivery was higher than the average cheque per meal in the delivery space. Now, that may change,” feels Tanna. If that happens, it might be a taste for what the future holds.