NEW YORK - A food delivery service is offering New Yorkers the chance to try some food cooked by some unexpected chefs.

All seven employees at Eat Offbeat are either refugees or asylum seekers who fled their home countries. They're cooking foods from those places, including Iraq and Nepal.

None had any professional cooking experience before coming to work for the startup, which launched in November.

The company has committed to hiring refugees and teaching them culinary skills, partly for altruistic reasons and partly as a business strategy. In a city filled with good ethnic food, it is a way for the cuisine to stand out.