I read an article recently about the various delivery services from restaurants that don’t normally deliver. I was curious so I downloaded Grub Hub, Door Dash, and Uber Eats a few weeks ago. Last night my wife already ate and we didn’t have anything interesting in the fridge and I didn’t feel like going out so I decided this was the time to try it out.
I found one of my favorite Mexican restaurants on Door Dash so I put in an order for Crab Enchiladas. The restaurant is pricey but the food is worth it. It looked like the price was about the same using Door Dash… plus a $3.75 delivery charge. I placed my order, added a tip… and that was it. They responded that it would be about 45 minutes.
I got a few text messages telling me that the order was placed… later, being picked up… and then that Anthony was on his way. I could even see his route and where he was on it. I could track it down to when he was on my street. I got up and went to the door just as the doorbell rang. Anthony was very nice and handed me my bag from his insulated tote. It was amazingly convenient… no payment at the door, tip was already taken care of (I double checked), and the food was amazing. They even added freshly made chips and two kinds of salsa. Oh, and it got here in about 30 minutes instead of 45.
This may be just a little too convenient for those nights where we don’t want to cook but also don’t feel like going out, and pizza just doesn’t sound great.
Anyone else with experiences with these types of services?
I used Caviar once, which worked just fine. My daughter and her business partner are launching their new app in a few months for the same sort of idea.
I have once or twice, years ago. It was ok, I guess, there was only one company that provided that service in the area though. We ordered steak both times, the order was deliviered at exactly 1 hour and 30 minutes both times and the steaks were never actually cooked as ordered. After the second time, we decided it just wasn’t worth it. But that was almost 20 years ago, and the technology for ordering and tracking wasn’t there either.
I have never used Door Dash, and only used GrubHub once (when the restaurant itself didn’t offer its own delivery service). we don’t order food for delivery very often - there are half a dozen restaurants within a couple of blocks of our place.
But I had to look up address info for Door Dash this week (a client used to work there, and I needed the address to fill out some forms for him). The first hit on Google was to Yelp for the service itself, and the reviews were absolutely terrible! No shows, tons of incorrect orders, delivery drives lying about having picked up the food because the restaurant itself said it was still there, difficulties getting refunds for items not received, etc.
I use Grub Hub a lot and a few of the lesser known ones as well. For the most part around me the restaurants available deliver already but ordering on line is quicker and easier.
Frequent user of GrubHub. We live in an area with a concentration of restaurants, so the timing and distance works to our advantage. Always have a positive experience. However, I would say we use it for mid-range restaurants, no white tablecloth type places. I can’t imagine a pricey steak or seafood dish would travel especially well.
I use DoorDash sporadically. Sometimes twice a week, and sometimes several months go by without using it. There are a lot of restaurants on their list, but I’d say maybe only 10% are decent enough that I’d want to order from them. You have to experiment, because some food just doesn’t survive the delivery process as well as other stuff does. I’ve probably used the service 30-40 times, and I think my order only got screwed up once. I don’t know if it was the restaurant’s fault or the delivery service. I’m guessing the former.
Their website leaves a lot to be desired, though. I’m amazed there isn’t a “you last order this” button since people often want to order the same thing. And the order of the restaurants keeps changing, so you have to hunt all the time. But once you order, they are really good at giving you progress texts.
We order from Grub Hub two or three times a week. Our only serious complaint concerned tacos and nachos that were stone cold and wet; obviously our food had sat around a while or we were the last on the delivery route (or both).
Grub Hub is great about doing refunds when deliveries are sub-par. The taco place refused our request for a refund, we called GH and they immediately refunded our order and sent us a $10 gift certificate.
Sometimes restaurants that haven’t done delivery before need a bit of time to get the operations going efficiently; we’re patient about this, YMMV. We had a wonderful soul food place that couldn’t get the hang of food delivery. They’d make substitutions without calling us “we ran out of ribs so we sent chicken wings/ran out of two-liter Sprite, here are two canned orange sodas.” They got out of the game so we do takeout with them.