Airbnb allows anyone to transform their home into a hotel. Uber allows anyone to transform their car into a taxi.

Will Menu Next Door see a legion of home cooks transform themselves into restaurateurs?

The company’s investors certainly seem to think so. Menu Next Door, which puts home cooks and their hungry neighbours in touch with one another, recently raised US$2 million to fund its current expansion.

Previously only available in Paris and Brussels—where there are already 900 home cooks and 110,000 total users—the service is about to hit London and, potentially, the big time.

Select a Parisian or Belgian address at random and you’ll be presented with a surprisingly broad range of options: pork loin in tonkatsu sauce with vegetables (A$11), red pepper stuffed with chili con carne with caramelised pear and apple crumble for dessert (A$14), Venezuelan-style rice and beans with Spanish bienmesabe for dessert (A$15.50), and even American-style Sloppy Joes (A$14)—all within a couple of kilometres.

Menu Next Door isn’t a delivery service: you have to rock up to the cook’s front door and pick up your order in person. “At first, it seemed a bit awkward going to someone’s home to pick up food,” TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet wrote about using Menu Next Door for the first time. “But when you realise that everybody signed up for this, things get easier.” Menu Next Door goes as far as to suggest that many cooks offer their customers a drink and invite them to sit down and have a chat while the finishing touches are being made to their order.

You have order your meal one or two days in advance as well, meaning that delivery sites and actual restaurants are going to continue to be the go-to for the spontaneous late-night meal at the office or the midweek surrender to apathy for a while yet.

But Menu Next Door’s business model is nevertheless a clever one. By not producing any food itself, or employing any delivery people, it can afford to be competitive with its prices. More importantly, it’s selling something that people want. The appeal of a hearty home-cooked meal—as opposed to, say, the usual Chinese take-out or greasy delivered pizza—is undeniable in these troubled, time-poor times.

It’s not a bad deal for the cooks, either. Menu Next Door charges no commission (or “Nothing. Nada. Niente.” as the company’s website puts it) and claims that popular cooks can earn more than €350 in revenue (about $A540) a night.

Whether Menu Next Door manages to avoid the controversies that Airbnb, Uber and other so-called peer-to-peer services have experienced remains to be seen, of course. Customers can maybe rest assured that the company has put policies in place to make sure that food poisoning rarely if ever happens, and claims that it will cover the customer’s costs should it in fact occur.

The cooks might be a little more nervous. Should one’s efforts not to be up to snuff, after all, the disgruntled diner knows where you live…

There is no official word yet when the service might become available in Australia.