About Mise en Party

Mise en Party is a meal planner that actually helps you cook: you pick the dishes for a meal, and it gives you one optimized, step-by-step order so every dish finishes at the same time, as quickly as possible. Prep work is shared across dishes and fitted into the gaps, like chopping onions while the stew simmers. The order also accounts for tools in your kitchen, so two steps never compete for the same pot. When friends or family help, every dish's steps are split between all the cooks, rather than each person taking one dish. Mise en Party also covers the standard meal planner features: importing your favorite recipes, planning days or weeks ahead, and a generating a shopping list from your plan.

Mise en Party schedules the cooking itself, customizing it to your unique kitchen and needs, so you can spend less time worrying about what comes next and more time partying.

Cooking the meal

• Meal timing: each dish's steps are woven into a single schedule so every dish is ready on time and the meal is done as soon as possible.
• Tool scheduling: the app accounts for your burners, your pots, and your pans so no two steps use the same tool at the same time.
• Cooking together: all cooks work on all dishes, rather than a potluck where each person makes just one.
• Hosting a dinner party: one sitting with courses, servings for the table, the day-before work moved ahead, and a page for every helper.

Prep

• Mise en place: the recipes organize ingredients into bowls based on when they are used, making the actual cooking process as simple as adding bowls 1, 2, and 3.
• Shared prep: the same prep step across dishes is combined; for example, you chop the onions and garlic for every dish at once.
• Prepping recipes ahead of time: work for a later meal, like an overnight dough or a chicken marinade, is incorporated into tonight's meal, grouping kitchen time into fewer sessions.
• Thawing frozen food: tick Needs thawing on an ingredient and taking it out of the freezer becomes a step of its own, due two hours before it is cooked, on the day or the day before.

Across the week

• Batch cooking: the app automatically batches recipes like stocks into a single cook to be re-used during their shelf life.
• Recipes as ingredients: a spice mix or stock is its own recipe, and is scheduled along with the dish that uses it.
• Ingredient substitutions: choose vegetarian or allergy-safe, and compatible recipes adjust automatically.
• A shopping list built from your meal plan: your shopping list is built straight from your meal plan, grouped and filtered the way you shop.

To obtain all the benefits that Mise en Party offers requires that the recipes be highly structured on the back-end. This means that writing recipes, as well as importing them, is more involved. Additionally, while you may have an intended way to order the steps of a recipe, the time optimization may jumble directions around, primarily the prep work, to produce the quickest recipe. This isn't entirely a negative as it means you don't need to write the recipe in the time optimal order, the app figures that out on its own.

Mise en Party also tends to generate a lot of bowls to wash. While a dish washer can make quick work of a set of bowls, the app suggested time during cooking to get ahead on the cleaning. In general, I find that while the drying rack is overflowing after dinner, there are less items to clean after I've had my meal and feel no desire to get back up and clean.

Mise en Party is for anyone who wants to eat good food for less effort. I use it three to four nights a week to cook dinner for my wife and me, and for the bigger meals we cook together on weekends. It works the same whether you're cooking on your own, with a partner or a roommate, or hosting a holiday dinner for twelve with a few friends helping in the kitchen.

Mise en Party is built and run by me, Cam Zalewski, a solo developer, digital systems engineer, and data privacy researcher. Right now Mise en Party is my full-time job, or a bit over full time, as it's a hard project to put down. Outside of it I mostly read, rock climb, and run. I also have some differential privacy work I'm looking to publish once the app gets off the ground.

I cook lots of Asian food, but I'm trying to branch out. I'm an engineer, and I like to push things to their limits. Automation is fun too, and this app automates a lot of the mental load of kitchen work. Factorio, anyone?

There is no company or team behind it; bug reports, recipe requests, and feature ideas all reach me directly.

Mise en Party grew out of a Google Sheets meal planner I built in 2020 just so I could organize recipe ingredients into bowls. During the pandemic, my wife and I started planning meals in two-week chunks, shopping for all our groceries in a single weekend afternoon. This saved us such a tremendous amount of time that the habit stuck well after the end of lockdown. To support the bulk shopping, the bowl spreadsheet grew into a tangle of Google Sheets and API scripts that sorted recipes, generated shopping lists, and let us iterate on dishes and share recipes with friends and family. The solution was functional, but Google Sheets was not built for this purpose, making the end result slow and tedious to use. During this period, the project was known as the Food-Table, owing its name to the literal table in a spreadsheet of recipes. One weekend in 2023, I sat down to make a quick web UI, one to two weekends tops... and years later, here we are.

Mise en Party is primarily inspired by mise en place, French for 'putting in place'. The first motivating feature of Mise en Party is the built-in prep bowls, so ingredients that enter the dish at the same time can be prepared together ahead of time. The most striking and novel feature of Mise en Party is the multi-cook optimization that lets you cook directly with your friends and family, making cooking a party.

Not directly. The recipe merging and meal timings are solved with a constraint solver, so you'll never get a hallucinated schedule. LLMs are impressive tools, but the timing optimization of 3 recipes with 40 directions, and the constraint of 4 cooktop burners, across 3 days with 2 cooks is not a task they are suited for. I'd prefer the app not use AI at all, but the nature of the market means I need to support some level of recipe import. The import pipeline leverages existing recipes and internal data to format user recipes, but some natural language processing is required, such as for pulling paragraphs apart to identify prep steps or categorizing new ingredients with shopping list labels.

Mise en Party is free during the closed beta. After launch, a Free plan stays for planning and shopping lists, with paid plans for the full app; see pricing.

Join the waitlist on the home page with your email address, and I'll write to you when a beta seat opens.

Not in the app stores. Mise en Party runs in the browser on your phone, tablet, or computer, with nothing to install.

Mise en Party is self-funded and independent: there are no venture capitalists forcing me to add AI features nobody wants. There are no ads, and your data is never sold.

In the navigation bar dropdown menu, Report a Bug opens a form for submitting bugs, issues, or feature suggestions.

Use it, and tell me what works and what doesn't through Report a Bug. Feedback is always welcome and if you know someone who cooks, send them my way!