Seafood stew comes from Grace's Kitchen, which promises restaurant-quality food in gourmet dinners for two. Click photo for larger image.

OK, so it's not La Varenne Cooking School, or Cordon Bleu.

But you can make decent food -- indeed, a half-dozen tasty meals for a family of five -- at either of Pittsburgh's two new competing meal assembly centers: Super Suppers, with stores in Monroeville, McMurray and Cranberry (opening soon), or Creative Dinners and More in McMurray and Wexford.

So what if there's no Burgundy wine in Creative Dinners' Beef Stroganoff? Or no chipotle in Super Suppers' Santa Fe Soft Tacos?

If not exactly home-cooked, this is good, solid family fare, special but not fancy, a step up from pizza or Tuna Helper. For busy, middle-class working families with the cash to fork out $100 for about a week's worth of dinners -- at about $3 a serving -- it's a good deal.

Recent "undercover" visits to Super Suppers' Monroeville outlet and Creative Dinners' Wexford store yielded some differences, but not enough to recommend one over the other. Both seemed spotlessly clean. Both had helpful employees, although the staff at Creative Dinners was more hands-on, providing a careful tour beforehand of where everything was. At Super Suppers, the two staffers, who were pleasant enough, tended to hang out in a back room unless called.

Directions for assembling the meals, framed and posted on shelves above the work stations, were fairly simple to follow, although there was a bit of a learning curve -- as there would be in any kitchen where, at first, you're not sure where they keep the parsley or the measuring spoons.

Portions were plentiful, easily serving five to six people. But a warning: In this era of the microwave, these assembled dinners are something of a throwback, relying on the freeze/thaw/bake method of food prep. If, before going to work, you forgot to take the night's dinner out of the freezer to thaw in the morning, you may end up spending two hours trying to bake a frozen solid Italian chicken and pasta dish into something presentable.

How does it taste?

Menus at both were heavy on chicken, light on fish (in both places, shrimp and tilapia), light on spices, a little salty, heavy on cream sauces. These assembled dinners are, for the most part, not diet food. There were more casserole or brunch-y items on Super Suppers' menu, and more starchy side dishes. Crunchy Baked Chicken -- lemon juice, dijon mustard and parsley dipped in Panko bread crumbs -- came with a bag of seasoned noodles to boil up; there was rice with the Shrimp, Chicken and Artichoke bake, and pasta with the garlicky Italian Chicken. My family and colleagues liked Super Suppers' Chicken a la Florentine Braided Bread the best; the aforementioned Santa Fe Tacos, consisting of lean ground chuck, tomatoes, mild green chilis and beans, were bland and "too beany," my husband said -- although the portions were huge and you can always add chili powder at home.

At Creative Dinners, more emphasis was on the protein -- pork chops, crab cakes, beef stroganoff -- without starch or other side dishes. Marinated Steak, essentially London Broil with olive oil, soy sauce and a proprietary seasoning mix, was lip-smackingly good, as were the crab cakes, which contained good lump crabmeat and held together well when sauteed. There's a chicken-stuffed bread "braid" too, although this one contains broccoli and almonds instead of spinach and ham.

Super Suppers provides frozen meat, fish and poultry for assembling dinner menus and relies heavily on canned, jarred and pre-cooked ingredients -- canned mushrooms, pre-cooked rice, garlic cloves, pre-made "Bechamel," a white cream sauce.

Creative Dinners' mushrooms, on the other hand, were fresh, as was their meat, fish and poultry -- but that "from scratch" approach, a point of pride for them, can backfire. The cream sauce in the Pesto Chicken -- which the customer makes by massaging flour, water and a cream soup base together in a Ziploc plastic bag -- had lumps in it, tasted floury and wasn't as good as the mystery pre-fab sauce provided by Super Suppers.

Because Creative Dinners' ingredients aren't frozen, they are, by necessity, much stricter about hygiene. You must bring a cooler or buy one on the premises to cart your food home. Plastic gloves must be worn at all times, meat must be removed from one bag to another using tongs and patrons are asked to wash their hands after making each entree. Much of the assembly, in fact, involved dropping various ingredients in plastic bags, zipping them shut, and massaging them together.

At Super Suppers, there's a little more contact with the food -- frozen chicken and seafood pieces are carefully arranged in a foil pan and sprinkled with cheese, mayonnaise is smeared onto frozen chicken, dough for the chicken braid is rolled out with a pin and flattened. And everything can be loaded into a box, not a cooler, for a quick ride home.

Price

At Creative Dinners, $99 will buy five nights' worth of meals, serving four to six people, while a dozen dinners costs $209. There are a range of prices in between. At Super Suppers, $109 buys six entrees serving four to six people; $199 buys a dozen meals.

Atmosphere

Kitchen Studio Rustic with stainless steel accents, at both. If you prefer Southwest decor, with saffron colored walls and black wrought-iron shelving, go to Super Suppers. If you're partial to the Tuscan farmhouse look and "La Boheme" in the background, Creative Dinners is for you.

Because these centers have a limited number of work stations, it's necessary to book in advance, although Super Suppers takes "walk ins" on Wednesdays. The day I showed up, there was only one other person there, so I pretty much had the place to myself. At Creative Dinners, where I booked a noon "class" a week in advance, the place was full -- too full, in fact, when I found myself standing around waiting because the workstations for Crab Cakes, Beef Stroganoff and Marinated Steak were occupied.

There was a good reason for that, though -- the manager had received a panicked phone call that morning from a customer in tears begging to be let in on short notice because a friend had just undergone cancer surgery and she needed to make some dinners, pronto.

It was nice, for once, to see someone deviate off the cheery, carefully marketed script in the name of messy humanity -- even if it meant that I made it out of Creative Dinners with five nights' worth of dinners in an hour and 45 minutes instead of an hour and a half.

Would I go back? Sure, if they opened one closer to my home in Pittsburgh's East End. Wexford and Monroeville are simply too far to justify the drive, given today's higher gas prices, not to mention that this is all supposed to be about saving time.

There's no question, though, that my family has eaten better during the past two weeks. Now if I can just remember to thaw out the chicken satays with peanut sauce before leaving for work tomorrow morning . . .