Review: Dinnerly Meal Kit

“This is a real Midwestern meal,” my father said, digging into a plate I'd prepared from the Martha Stewart–endorsed Dinnerly meal kit. “Meat. Potatoes. Green beans.”

This, for my father, was high praise. It was the type of meal he'd grown up with as a child in Nebraska: hearty, no-nonsense, balanced, always something green, and always a slab of meat. For a week on a visit while my mother spent time with the grandkids, I cooked him dinners with Dinnerly, the lower-cost cousin of the truly excellent, cheffy Marley Spoon meal kit also endorsed by Stewart (and also by me: 8/10, WIRED Recommends). The biggest surprise for him was how much some of these meals intersected with old-school American home scratch cooking. (See WIRED's guide to the Best Meal Delivery Services and Meal Kits of 2025.)

The “Greek Lemon-Oregano Chicken” we were eating did indeed involve a bit of citrus, but this character was less notable than the salty savoriness of deglazed chicken broth deepened by the browned bits from the chicken. Oregano hardly felt exotic, to anyone at the table. Heck, they might even serve this chicken in Nebraska. The potatoes were Yukon golds that I'd cut, boiled, buttered, garlicked, and mashed by hand. The beans were fresh, and simple as it gets.

As with its more expensive cousin, Dinnerly's chicken breast looked significantly better than what I'd expect to find at a mid-tier supermarket: plump, pink, and nicely trimmed of any un-renderable fats. The portions were large enough that each of us wondered whether we'd finish, but still finished.

On its best meals, which tend to be its most classic, Dinnerly doesn't feel at all like a budget meal kit. Just as Marley Spoon does, it can feel like good home cooking. And yet it does cost about 30 percent less than Marley Spoon, adding up to $6 to $9 a serving including shipping, depending on how many you order in a week. (Preferences include “gluten-free-friendly,” low calorie, low carb, picky-eater approved, quick and easy, and vegetarian. Meals can be paused or canceled at any time.)

The seams can show a bit on some recipes, especially in terms of some apparent shortcuts on recipe development. But the real key to Dinnerly's lower cost shows up as simplicity.

Simplicity as Parsimony

It's hard not to compare Dinnerly and Marley Spoon. Both meal kits come from the same company, after all, founded in Germany but embellished with homemaking demiurge Martha Stewart's brand and cooking techniques.

Both arrive the same way, in a box with ingredients for all recipes jumbled together: fresh produce and unrefrigerated food in a little box flat on the top, with meat and dairy and other more sensitive perishables on the box's cool-packed bottom. Basic staples such as flour, butter, sugar, and oil are assumed to be in your pantry: They don't come in the box.

It's a good system, or at least it must be: I didn't find a bum piece of produce, or less-than-fresh meat, in boxes from either meal plan over the course of a month. And each meal kit also comes with the same version of recipe card, split into six sections with recipe instructions—and ingredients running down the left side of the card.

But consistently, Dinnerly had significantly fewer ingredients in each recipe, and fewer steps to follow. Whereas a Marley Spoon recipe tends to embellish, a Dinnerly recipe will settle on a simple herb accent or a blended spice packet, and fewer types of vegetables even if the calorie count ends up the same in the end. Recipes, too, are simpler: Most of the Dinnerly recipes have just five steps, and fewer buried extra steps.

And so multiple of Dinnerly's recipes may take the quite simple form of protein, starch, veggie: an herbed chicken on tabbouleh with cubes of tomato and cucumber. Meatballs with potato and pepper. Gravied chicken with mashed potatoes and peas. “Cajun” chicken over rice, with broiler-charred brussels sprouts. Dinner that looks like dinner, as it had long been understood in any number of Anglo-Germanic American homes.

By the way, it's mostly pretty delicious, relying on a certain number of can't-miss cooking saws: boiling potatoes from cool water before mashing. Reserving cooking water to reintroduce later. Deglazing pans with broth to soak up the tasty browned-bit fond. Lemon juice for brightness, but zest for flavor. Toasting rice in butter before simmering in water, to keep it from devolving into piles of sad gluten. In short, good cooking.

And so if the Cajun chicken is actually just “chicken with kinda spicy-sweet barbecue gloss as a glaze,” I'm inclined to forgive it, because after following the instructions, your medallion-sliced chicken is juicy and flavorful, its sauce caramelized to its top like the glaze on a meatloaf. And if the “shawarma” is clearly not shawarma, but rather a take on Morroccan-spiced chicken meatball that made the rounds in online recipe circles a few years back? I don't mind this too much either: Meatballs taste good when spiced with ras el hanout, and dredged in a tzatziki dipper.

And maybe my dad and I bonded a little over how much we ended up liking the middle-American trashiness of a “Reuben meatloaf” that chopped sauerkraut in with the beef, spiced it with copious caraway, and melted fontina over the top with housemade Russian dressing. Combined with air-fried, fresh-cut fries (the recipe called for baking and broiling, but I used what I preferred), it was like a trip to every West Coast brewpub from the early 1990s.

But Here's Where It Sometimes Fails

Like all meal kits and all writers' recipes, Dinnerly lies a bit. Anything that says it takes 30 minutes will take at least 45 minutes instead. This is expected. And you may have to hunt and peck around in your box to find the right ingredients for each recipe. This, in the end, is still better than poking around my own cupboards and fridge.

But recipe development and testing is, in part, where Dinnerly can sometimes show its seams. In specific, hoo boy, they need to lay off the broiler a little. Finishing a dish on the broiler is a neat parlor trick for browning or char, but a couple recipes leaned on the broiler to cook the whole dish quickly—and no two broilers, alas, are quite the same.

Following Dinnerly's directions on a “grass fed ground beef and cheddar quesadilla” recipe, I knew before even scooting in the tray that they'd immediately scorch under my oven's broiler, which they quickly started to do before I yoinked them back out. The mini-quesadillas were too thick, filled to their collective brim with 10 ounces of beef and 4 ounces of cheese, puffing them too high and close to my broiler burners. (Also, this ratio of much beef to a little cheese does not lead to a quesadilla, more like a flattish folded flauta. But I quibble.)

In the end, my super-beefy quesadillas still tasted pretty good after I improvised and dropped the oven tray down a notch. After all, I'm a big sucker for the cumin-paprika-chili-powder substance that the English-speaking world has long called “taco seasoning.”

But it was a recipe pitfall I'd seen coming when I read the recipe to begin with. On Dinnerly, unlike cheffier cousin Marley Spoon (whose recipes are signed by first and last name), I was occasionally left to wonder whether some corners had been cut on recipe testing—especially when I looked online and saw half a dozen similar beefy quesadilla recipes with slightly different instructions.

But after this, I'd whip up a quick cheesy roux for a hearty tortelloni dish with gently charred broccoli, or an herb-crusted chicken from a pristine-looking chicken breast, and forget my complaints.

Dinnerly offers, after all, genuine value. It doesn't cost much compared to most other meal kits, and its mostly scratch-made recipes still require fairly little effort to make. On my household food budget, it would make actual sense as a two- or three-night supplement to regular meal planning. Among the meal kit's most balanced and classic plates—simple seared proteins and produce and maybe some lemon-accented starch—the satisfaction of its meals can genuinely surprise you. Or more to the point, when you’re bone-tired on a Tuesday night, Dinnerly can cause you to surprise yourself.