Grub Street recent complied a list of the best food and drink perks at New York startups.

And take SpareFoot, a fast-growing company in Austin, Tex., that's an online marketplace for consumers to find and reserve self-storage units.

"I had heard about Silicon Valley companies having chefs, yes, but more recently many Austin tech startups were doing it, too," Chuck Gordon, founder and CEO of SpareFoot, tells The Salt in an email. "I got a chance to check some of those out and figured we could probably pull off something pretty great at SpareFoot."

In May, after several months of searching, SpareFoot hired Ari Dvorin, who had been the head chef at Facebook's Austin office and also ran his own catering company. Before Dvorin came on board, SpareFoot's 90 employees could count on the company to buy tacos on Mondays and keep a snack shelf fully stocked. But otherwise, it was basically "fend for yourself," says Dvorin.

Rachel Greenfield, a marketing manager who's been with SpareFoot for 2 1/2 years, says she used to go out for lunch, but got burned out on the nearby options. Now that Dvorin cooks lunch every day for her and her colleagues, Greenfield says, "lunch has become a fun social moment, a gathering space with a lot of intermingling. It reminds me of school lunch, except that we're all beyond the clique part. People don't linger too long — they want to get back to work, so it's very time-efficient for us."

When SpareFoot moved into its current space, it had no need for a chef or a kitchen. So Dvorin has to cook the lunch early in the morning at a kitchen he rents across town and transports it to the office, where he has a small space with an oven to finish cooking.

It's tough work to get the timing right, especially since the menu changes every day for two months, he says. But he far prefers it to working in a restaurant, where "the menu was same and you are stuck working in a 4-by-4 foot area."

Like a lot of tech startup chefs, Dvorin is big on themes. On Monday, he serves comfort food, followed by Taco Tuesday, and International Wednesday. And every day there are fresh salads and vegetarian options."Everyone is so appreciative of the food and dining experience," he says.

That's exactly what the CEOs hope to get out of investing in a chef who cater directly to employees. According to Sider of BandPage, food programs drive a lot of value to tech companies.

"What we've seen it's certainly worth the cost; the chef and the food program yield productivity, stronger culture, stronger community," he says. "We can really see the benefits." Eating together every day, he says, is a team building exercise: "instead of doing trust falls we have a chef."

Young chefs coming out of the top culinary schools also seem to be drawn to these new opportunities, according to Jan Smith, spokeswoman for the Culinary Institute of America. "We have had a steady flow of externs at Google, and ... at least one grad who worked at Facebook," she says.

Callie Waldman, the chef at BandPage, says working for a competitive tech company creates unique challenges.

"It's really important to me that I'm able to cook a variety of meals so that the employees don't feel as if they're eating at the same restaurant every day," she says. "The challenge ... of constant innovation feeds my creative side and keeps things interesting for everyone, myself included." Recently, that meant playing around with variations on Taco Tuesday: Japanese sushi tacos and Indian-style tikka masala tacos.

And, Waldman adds, it's a lot more rewarding to cook for colleagues who you know and respect.

"I couldn't imagine switching to the restaurant industry, cooking from the same menu every day where meals go through the double doors having no idea who's on the other side," says Waldman.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

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