PHOTO COURTESY OF CHIP AND KALE

As someone who quotes “Seinfeld” daily, I was thrilled to find mulligatawny soup on the menu at Chip and Kale, a plant-based meal-kit delivery service in Beechview.

The South Indian-inspired dish was one of the coveted offerings at a fictional eatery featured in the ’90s sitcom. (Try screaming, “No soup for you!” at anyone over 40; chances are they’ll break into a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routine.)

In between taste tests and Cosmo Kramer impressions, I stirred the pot and chuckled to myself. A lot of folks would get little kicks out of seeing me, the professional restaurant patron, cooking in her own kitchen.

But, this is serious business. This is the Summer of George.

PHOTO COURTESY OF CHIP AND KALE

I first interviewed John and Zita Lopez, the owners of Chip and Kale, in October 2020, when Covid was still keeping restaurant-hopping foodies homebound.

Founded in 2014, their company was ready-made for the pandemic.

With Chip and Kale deemed an essential business, orders started pouring in, quadrupling the facility’s output overnight. The couple maintained that breakneck pace for more than a year. These days, Pittsburgh restaurants are back to packed and the Lopezes continue to take the grunt work out of home-cooking.

A new menu of frozen meal kits is posted online every Tuesday. Zita prepares four dishes that produce four servings each.

Site visitors can choose from eight entrees and a la carte options.The ingredients, from rice and tofu to spices and sauces, are measured, chopped, bagged, numbered and labeled with easy-to-follow instructions. Many Chip and Kale customers report that their children help make the meal.

“It’s Cooking By Numbers,” says Zita, who hails from the Czech Republic. “It’s very simple and very easy, even for people who don’t know how to cook.”

I hear her voice in my head each time I read meal-kit instructions. Despite her upbringing in Prague, Zita’s not a fan of greasy Central European fare, so Chip and Kale’s menu puts a lighter, veggie-friendly spin on traditional recipes and other global dishes.

In addition to mulligatawny soup, I expertly dethawed skillet tacos, Nashville mac-and-cheese, breakfast burritos and cinnamon rolls. My daughter, Sarah — who did not assist me in the kitchen — was perplexed; the stuff tasted too good to be Mom-made.

She’s devoured the Lopezes’ food before. In June, we ran into them at the new Hazel Grove Brewing, where they were operating a pop-up called Side Hustle Pizza PGH.

For three years, John, a Jeannette native, has happily baked the neo-Neapolitans in a Gozney Roccbox Pizza Oven, a belated birthday gift from Zita. After perfecting his recipes and technique, he’s now a regular vendor at the Mt. Lebanon Lions Farmers Market and a Saturday fixture at Hitchhiker Brewing Co.’s Castle Shannon Boulevard location. Side Hustle is such a success, he had to purchase more pizza ovens.

Luckily, John’s good at stretching dough.

Chip and Kale’s former Westmoreland County kitchen, along with its current headquarters in Beechview, once housed pizza shops. When the family lived in Nashville, Tennessee, John transformed a failing Little Caesar’s franchise into a booming business.

Making pies brings him peace.

The one piece that Sarah let me eat at Hazel Grove was delicious, so it’s only a matter of time before this side hustle becomes a main feature on the growing pizza scene.

When she first visited Pittsburgh in 2012, Zita fell in love with the city because the topography and industrial vibe reminded her of home. The family packed their bags, parted ways with Tennessee’s corporate world, bought a fixer-upper in Beechview and formulated a small business plan.

More than a decade later, they’re still feeding families, spreading joy in the form of pizza toppings and making hapless cooks feel like celebrity chefs.

As Puddy would say, “High five!”