The kitchen and the cellar, one household
Dinner and the bottle, decided together.
Food needs wine and wine needs food. Yes Chef keeps the recipes, the dinner plan, the shopping list and the cellar in one place, so each can see what the other is up to. One household, one set of keys.
What you put in is private to your household. You share a recipe when you decide to, and nothing else.
Thursday, 5:40pm
Someone asks what is for dinner. Someone says they do not mind. Nobody means it.
The recipe you liked is a screenshot. Nobody remembers which bottle was meant for a night like this, which ones need drinking soon, or what any of them cost. The shopping list is in three people's heads, and two of them have a different idea about what "we're out of olive oil" means.
Yes Chef is the one place the household keeps all of it, and the dinner and the bottle are kept side by side. It is not a feed and it is not a social network. It is the kitchen drawer and the cellar book, with a search box.
Hand in hand
Dish to bottle. Bottle to dish.
- From a recipe to your cellar
- Open a recipe and see the bottles you already own that suit it. Pin the one you mean to open, so the plan remembers.
- From a bottle to your book
- Open a bottle and see recipes from your own book that suit it, plus a few dish ideas by title if the book has nothing yet.
- Tonight, on the home screen
- The best match for tonight's dinner sits under the dinner. Beside it, a Drink soon list for what is running out of time.
- Running out of time shows
- A bottle past its drink window is flagged in the cellar and in every pairing list, so the one that needs opening gets picked first.
How it decides, plainly: it compares the tags you gave a bottle, plus a few cues for its style, against a recipe's title, tags and ingredients. It is a heuristic, not a sommelier. It suggests; you choose.
The kitchen
From "I don't mind" to a list in your pocket.
The screens on this page are the real ones, with a made-up household: Maya, Dev and Jo.
- 01 Sunday
Ask for a plan, then fix it
Tell the wizard which nights you are cooking, how many of them can be chicken, and that nothing takes more than 45 minutes. It draws from your book, your ideas list, or recipes people have made public.
It hands back a week. You change what you do not like. Nights that are already locked are never touched.
The plan-my-week form: four nights, two chicken, one fish and one vegetarian, 45 minutes and 700 calories at most, drawing from the book and the ideas list. - 02 Monday
Put up options, let people vote
Thursday gets up to three cook ideas and up to three eat-out ideas. Everyone votes. Voting again moves your vote, so nobody is stuck with a mistake they made in a hurry.
Any member can lock the winner. A tie does not lock, which is the correct behavior for a tie.
Thursday has three options. Braised chicken thighs leads with two votes, so it is ready to lock. - 03 Tuesday
The list writes itself
Build from the planner and the recipes you picked turn into one list. Lemons from two dishes become one line of three. Amounts that can be added are added. "To taste" stays on its own line, where it belongs.
Lines are sorted by aisle. On your phone in the store, a tap checks a line off.
A shopping list sorted by aisle. Lemons from two recipes are one line of three. Onions and cannellini beans are checked off. - 04 Thursday
Cook it, then write down what you learned
Notes live on the recipe, next to the ingredients, so the next person who makes it reads them first. Photos go there too, up to 24 a recipe. Search finds any word in any of it.
A recipe with two reviews, five and four stars, with household comments about the lemon and the browning time.
The cellar
A cellar book that keeps up with you.
Private inventory for the household. Your bottles, prices, quantities and notes are never shared; a shared wine registry holds only facts found in public sources. Nothing below happens behind your back: people type it in or tap to confirm, and Yes Chef never connects to your mailbox.
Know what you have, and where it is
Producer, vintage, grape, style, how many. Name the places you keep wine, Fridge 1 or Rack 3, and the shelf inside it. Add the same wine twice and it offers to top up the lot instead of making a second one. If duplicates already crept in, one tap merges them and keeps the history.
On plans with AI, photograph the shelf and review the bottles it found before any of them are added.
When to drink it, and what it is worth
Every bottle gets a drink window. Type your own, or take a default from the style and the vintage. Past it, the bottle is flagged as over-aged wherever it shows up.
Record what you paid and watch the market price move. Prices are observations someone recorded, with a source and a date. On plans with AI, a lookup can find one, but only with a cited source, and you see it before it counts.
Each bottle keeps a history: acquired, drunk, removed, with a photo if you took one.
Wine clubs
Your wine club, handled.
Clubs ship every few months and email you about each one. Yes Chef files the mail, keeps the bottles waiting, and counts what you spent.
- 1
Forward the email. Your household has its own inbox address. It never logs in to your mailbox; it sees what you forward.
- 2
It is filed by winery. Order and tracking numbers, the date the winery really sent it, and offer deadlines are pulled out. Pictures stay off until you ask.
- 3
Bottles wait for you. On plans with AI, an order is read for its wines. They sit as pending until someone taps Add, and they merge into a lot you already have.
- 4
Count the spend. Add an order as club spend with one tap, or all of them. See the year, and every year before it.
Worth and timing
Know what it's worth. Know when to open it.
The cellar adds up what you have at current public prices, sets it beside what you paid, and draws the collection's value over time. Next to it, the count of bottles that are ready, and the ones already past their window.
The prices come from the web, with their sources. On plans with AI, a lookup searches public listings for each wine and keeps a price only if it can cite where it found it. No source, no price, no charge. Turn on tracking in the household settings and the cellar refreshes itself every 15 or 30 days.
Every figure is an estimate and you can overrule it. Yes Chef itself does not scrape anything; the AI does the looking, and shows its source.
The rest of the drawer
Small things that add up.
- Search
- Type "olives" and find the recipes, the notes where someone said too many, and the ingredient lines.
- Bring in a recipe
- On plans with AI, paste a link or a photo of a page and review what it read before it is saved. Or have it write one. Edit anything it gets wrong.
- Nutrition, labeled
- Estimates, shown as estimates. Weights come from the model, values from USDA data, and you can overrule both.
- A food budget you type in
- Set a number for the week, add what you spent, see projected against actual by week and by month. Yes Chef never reads a receipt for you.
- Ideas list
- Keep recipes you have not made yet. The planner and the wizard can draw from them, and nothing joins your book until a night is locked.
- Your own time zone
- Sunday evening is still this week. The household sets its zone once.
Sharing
Hand someone a recipe. Keep the rest.
Share a recipe with one link, or publish it to Discover. The person who saves it gets a copy of their own to change as they like.
When you improve the original, their copy says so, with a list of what changed. They tick the changes they want. Lines they edited themselves are left unticked, so nothing they did gets overwritten.
House rules
Yours stays yours.
The book can be shared. The cellar is nobody's business.
- Private by default. Your bottles, prices, quantities, planner, shopping list and votes are never shared. Household notes stay in the household.
- No ads, no feed, no one reading over your shoulder. Yes Chef never connects to your mailbox. We send account mail only (confirming your address, resetting a password, household invites); the only mail we read is what you choose to forward to your household inbox.
- Your people, your call. Owners add and remove members. Anyone removed loses access to your recipes, plan and cellar right away.
Connect an assistant
The kitchen and cellar, in the assistant you already use.
Yes Chef speaks MCP, the open protocol assistants use to reach outside tools. Connect Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Grok, or point your own script at it, and ask in plain words: what is for dinner Thursday, which bottles need drinking, put oat milk on the list.
It sees your household and nothing else. You choose read-only or read and change, the connection can expire, and you can revoke it. It needs a plan with API access, and a household owner sets it up.
Start your household's kitchen.
Make an account, name the household, and add the people you cook with afterwards. You get your own household; nobody else's comes with it.