Do you sometimes want a nice dinner at home but feel reluctant to cook it yourself? Or do you always miss the taste of delicious food prepared by a chef but feel it's inconvenient to go to a restaurant?

Now, Shanghai residents can log onto an app to hire a professional chef to come to their homes to cook for them. And with the approach of Christmas and New Year's Eve, these apps have become quite popular.

One of the most popular apps is Good Chef, which is run by Shanghai Lekuai Information Technology Co Ltd. Local media reported that one user simply left brief cooking requirements and his mobile phone number on the app and a chef soon called back to discuss the details of the meal.

The chef confirmed the menu over the phone and asked whether there were certain ingredients that he should avoid, according to the report. The chef also questioned the user in detail about what cooking appliances and ingredients he had in his home.

The following day, the chef came to the user's home with his chef's uniform and a bag of ingredients. He removed more than 20 bottles of seasoning from his bag. Many of the bottles were special recipes that only professional chefs know how to make.

In about two hours, the chef made four dishes and one soup. He also washed the plates he had used and cleaned the stove. He even took out the trash when he left.

The chef admitted that working in a restaurant is more straightforward than cooking at people's homes. At a restaurant, he only needed to cook and get along with the other chefs in the kitchen. But nowadays, he has a lot of other jobs on his plate, including buying ingredients and cleaning. He also has to deal with different clients and solve sudden problems that may occur.

Currently, smartphones dominate people's lives. In China, people have grown accustomed to using apps such as The Paper to browse the news, Taobao to buy stuff online and Baidu Map to get directions. The appearance of chef apps such as Good Chef adds yet another convenience to people's lives.

These kinds of apps are new and lack industry supervision or service standards, so there are many things about them that concern me.

For the chefs, their ability to handle interpersonal relationships is a serious challenge for them as they have to learn to be buyers, waiters and managers as well as good cooks.

Different clients have different cooking requirements and different tempers, so chefs have to learn how to provide good service to all of them.

I suggest that the companies that run chef apps should offer communication training for their chefs, especially those whose experience is limited to cooking. And it's better for a company to arrange for backup staff to support the chefs in case of an emergency.

From the clients' point of view, there are more problems. The government requires food businesses to have health certificates, work licenses and proof of technical proficiency for their chefs. Although chef apps are still new, there are no specific industry standards for their practitioners. So careful clients should pay attention to checking these certificates in advance to ensure they don't hire unqualified chefs.

For food safety reasons, clients should also ask the chefs to buy food at regular markets and ask them to produce receipts for the food to prevent anything unhealthy from making its way to their tables.

A good home cooking service requires the cooperation of both the chef and the client. Chefs should try hard to make good food and clients have to be tolerant.