Review: Marley Spoon Meal Kit

This creamy mushroom chicken breast did not taste like I cooked it, even though I definitely did. It tasted like my mom cooked it. But the only mom actually involved was the mother of all Yankees, Martha Stewart. I had simmered up my chicken with the help of a Marley Spoon meal kit.

Marley Spoon isn’t quite Martha Stewart’s meal kit: It was founded in Germany. But it isn’t not Martha Stewart’s meal kit, either. Stewart endorses the brand heartily on the Marley Spoon website, many of the early recipes and techniques for the United States rollout came from her larder, and the creamy mushroom chicken in particular was tagged as one of “Martha’s Best.” (The recipe was devised, in fact, by a food author and prolific recipe developer named Anna Painter.)

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

The mushroom chicken was the sort of recipe I’d usually never think to make: vaguely but not at all Hungarian, with crispity chicken bits deglazed into a Dijon-paprika chicken broth and fattened up with cream cheese. As the final step, I mashed up the plate’s bed of potatoes with a wealth of spinach. It was delicious in a way that reminded me of the generation of foods I’d grown up with: gentle, rich, tangy, earthy, yet no spicier than ripe garlic. It felt a little like home.

I worked as a food critic on two coasts for more than a decade, and I can be a harsh judge and skeptic of meal kit cuisine. But after days of cooking nothing but Marley Spoon dinners, I’ve come away feeling that Marley Spoon is the closest I’ve found to what a meal kit is supposed to offer—at least, if you truly enjoy preparing a meal.

Most of my meals from Marley Spoon have been fully realized, homestyle plates that take me just a little outside my usual repertoire. Meals that maybe teach me a little something, but still don’t take more than an hour to make.

The price is toward the top end of the meal kit world, about $9 to $13 a regular serving (with both premium and “saver” meals available), and $11 in shipping. In my experience, it bears out the price, but Marley Spoon also has a budget option called Dinnerly with simpler plates, at around two-thirds the price. (See WIRED's guide to the Best Meal Delivery Services and Meal Kits of 2025.)

Hello, Fresh

When I placed my initial order on Marley Spoon’s website, I did what I always do when I test meal kits. I allowed the website to choose my plates for me, throwing myself on the mercy of the brand’s algorithm. The path of least resistance is perhaps also the path to honesty.

The result turned out to be a hearty and familiar assortment: the aforementioned creamy chicken, but also cashew chicken over rice, a hearty lentil-sausage-kale soup, carnitas tostadas, eggplant parm, and Cajun tilapia with broccoli. (Though the picture on this last recipe card showed broccolini instead, which kinda made me want the broccolini I didn’t have in my box.)

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

My first pleasant surprise came when the box arrived. I cracked open the cardboard to a wealth of verdant greenery, a box that looked like one I might actually bring home from the grocery store— and with produce far fresher than what I’d find at the sad chain supermarket down my street, whose lettuce section can sometimes look like a practice drawing for Millet's “The Gleaners.” The lone exception was an eggplant just barely starting to pucker, which meant I had to mark the eggplant parm as my first meal.

Unlike many meal kits, the packaging was thankfully minimal on the produce front: lord, have I grown weary of individually shrink-wrapped meal-kit veg. Meat comes mostly raw, and chicken breasts and fish filets were both admirably trimmed to pristineness. Spice comes in tiny mixed packets, and the packaged brands included some I might choose for my own home, including Cento whole peeled tomatoes.

Marley Spoon ships overnight to a wealth of local delivery services depending on where you happen to be, so the boxes aren’t likely to sit for too long. But that said, this will depend mightily on your local delivery service.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

The recipe cards are fairly straightforward affairs, each limited ostensibly to six steps—though in practice, each step might contain multiple activities and some hidden extra steps. Each is clearly marked with allergens, calories, the necessary kitchen tools, and the basic kitchen staples you’ll need in order to cook.

Unlike many meal kits, Marley Spoon assumes you keep oil, vinegar, butter, salt, pepper, sugar, and eggs in your home. When the recipe calls for them, the presupposition is you live in a functional household that contains them. If this isn’t you, you may have to visit a store or your neighbor’s house—or just substitute your avocado oil for the grapeseed oil in the recipe, and shrug.

Marley also makes some assumptions about your stock of cookware, but in practice the meal kit is built for speed and so is mostly a stovetop affair. You can quite easily sub in a saucepot for a Dutch oven in most cases, if you have one and don’t have the other.

24-Hour Hearty People

As far as the recipes go, Marley Spoon leans toward full-flavored, hearty fare, usually with multiple stages of seasoning. Most are a pared-down take on New American or Continental classics. But that said, this depends on who made the recipe. Unlike many meal services, Marley Spoon is quite transparent about the stable of chefs who design its recipes, allowing you to discover reliable favorites.

Among the hundred or so offerings available at any one time on the weekly menu—including “premium” upgrade dishes—you'll find many variations on old-school and old-world dishes like steak and salad, chicken paprikash, or beef stroganoff, as well as some startlingly north-of-the-border takes on Mexican fare. Martha Stewart’s meal kit is very much not a tour into international traditions. But if you decide you cotton to chef Kevin Chen’s creations on the site, you’ll find interesting little updates like a gochujang pork meatloaf, or excursions into an Ethiopian key wat stew.

Among the dishes I tried, a gently Italian-ish lentil and chicken sausage soup was a beautifully satisfying winter rendition, steaming with thyme and garlic and heavy-laden with wilted kale, benefiting dramatically from the acidity and heat of a finishing dollop of wine vinegar I might not have thought to add.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

A Cajun tilapia belonged to a school of “Cajun” recipes whose main connection to New Orleans is a spice blend. But like many dishes on Marley Spoon, the recipe benefited from simple classical technique, in this case ample use of fond and classical deglazing—sweeping browned fish bits into a lemon broth and garlic butter, and ladling the sauce back over the top of the filets once re-introduced to the pan. The resulting fish was crisp, flaky, and flavorful. I solo-hoovered two filets in a single sitting, with no regrets.

Cashew chicken was a straight-ahead pan-fry with white rice, and an eggplant parm admirably crisp (though my time in Philly and Jersey wouldn’t let me sugar the tomato sauce even a smidge when San Marzanos are involved). And then there’s that aforementioned umami-drenched mushroom chicken, snappy with Dijon and earthily full of paprika, so familiar in all the right ways that it caused me to consult my mother about whether this was truly a dish from my childhood. She paused, a little confused. “Mushroom chicken was your father’s thing,” she said. From the other room, I could hear him laughing.

Some Quibbles

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

But nothing’s perfect, of course. The ingredients come jumbled together in the box that arrives each Monday, so the first recipe of the week can require a bit of a hunt, even if you thought you were well organized. And like pretty much all makers of recipes, Marley Spoon lies a bit about how long recipes will actually take—in practice, you’ll want to add 50 percent to whatever the total cook time advertises. Cookdown times, in particular, feel optimistic on both broths and sauces.

But for the most part, you’ll be done within an hour, the standard time I tend to allot for dinner prep anyway. If you’re the sort who requires that a meal prep be whippet-swift and uncomplicated and only this, keep walking. Marley Spoon’s recipes have a big yen for mise-en-place. One recipe seemed to assume I’m aswim in a sea of ramekins for reserved juice and zest and cooking water. Which is to say, this is not one-pot cooking, and there’s a little bit of cleanup to be expected.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

As with many American recipe sources, including The New York Times, some of the cultural reference points feel strained to breaking—as with that “Cajun” tilapia. The same went for carnitas tostadas whose protein was a seasoned, juicy, precooked pulled pork livened on the pan with a wealth of chili powder. The pork was in fact tasty and familiar, the chili-loving stepchild of countless suburban crockpots and barbecues, but I don’t think I would have called them carnitas.

But in general, these are small complaints—and differ from recipe author to recipe author on the Marley Spoon site. (I do wish it were easier to search recipes by author!) Considered as a whole, Marley Spoon offers vast and ever-rotating variety, full flavors, not insignificant ambition, admirable attention to ingredients, simple good technique, and often intelligence. It’s the meal kit that best approximates scratch cooking, and offers what I tend to ask for from a meal kit: a good plan, a grocery trip saved, and a helping hand held gently.