dahmakan - A Review / by Muhammad Amir Ayub

*Disclaimer: my brother works for this company.

Some factors led me to have dahmakan become my first choice way to have my meals whenever I’m alone without my family, regardless of whether I’m at home or at work.

There have been a few phases of how I would have my home meals ever since I moved back to KL. There was cooking steamed chicken marinated in Nando’s sauce. Then a long phase of pan grilled steak before switching to my current choice. In between there was also a phase of air frying ready to cook chicken.

I first tried out an ala carte order, then moved up the Prime memberships until going to the highest tier as I finish my meals of the lower tier.

So what do I like about dahmakan? So far for me, there hasn’t been much of the food that I’ve bought that I don’t like. This is even more true with their premium meals. My current favorite order: 1 premium meal, house chicken caesar salad and a Coke Zero.

What does this solve? First they claim to use the freshest ingredients with healthy cooking. I get my protein fix; not small pieces of meat covered in thicker fried flour. And there’s no time spent thawing ingredients, cooking (not so long with cooking steak, much lunger with making steamed chicken), cleaning. With the need to balance all of my commitments, saving time on eating was the obvious way to, but of course at a price I’m willing to pay. And so far the quality of food has been excellent in terms of being consistent. The vegetables are really always the freshest, and the taste has never varied from one order to the next (especially for someone like me who doesn’t really experiment with ordering other stuff).

Some cons do come with the service.  A Prime costs 26 ringgit ala carte (based on the Prime section of the website). A premium meal would cost 31 ringgit, while the cheapest meals would cost 15 instead (though on the menu section of the website they cost around 29/24/15 respectively). This makes it expensive as a once in a while choice. If you were to try out this service, I’d suggest subscribing to a Prime 10 subscription, try it out and see if you like it or not.

The amount of total meals prepared for sale is limited, and ditto for the number of drivers; if you order late, you either won’t have the desired delivery slot available or the meal would be sold out altogether. My guess + inner birdie talk: no wasted meals = no wasted cost, and food is always delivered freshly cooked.

My value proposition for this is that even when buying through another service (like Honestbee), a lot of times if you are ordering alone you might need to deal with service and delivery fees if you don’t meet a minimum order. Ordering via dahmakan with a Prime account is potentially cheaper in the long run (without the delivery charge and service charge usually waived with most ala carte orders. But you’ll need to fork out money upfront.

If you’re interested to try it out, do download the app here (via iTunes). You can also use the code MUHAMMRNO to get RM35 to try out dahmakan. See here if your area is covered.