How’s your self-quarantine dining going?
Are you cooking at home more, getting takeout more, or doing both about the same as before?
I’m actively avoiding the supermarket, so I’ve been getting a lot of takeout/delivery lately. Trying to keep it mostly to “real” restaurants and not fast food, but that discipline will surely break down at some point. Most restaurant entrees are usually good for at least 2 meals for me, so the expense is not yet squeezing my wallet too badly.
We don’t get takeout a lot, but we’ve been doing it a bit more often to support local restaurants (not chains).
I cook almost every day for our family (and when I don’t, it’s because we’re at my parents’ for Sunday dinner), so eating habits have not really changed. We stocked up a few days ago, so shopping habits have changed – I typically shop every day or every second day for dinner meals. Now I’m prepared for having enough food for a few weeks stocked.
We almost never eat out, always keep the pantry stocked, shop every ten days or so … exactly what we are doing now, except we are to the best of our ability disinfecting ourselves whenever we do shop.
I rarely used to order food for delivery to my door, but now all the “go out to eat” meals are replaced with “order food in”. I have learned to call the restaurant first to get a real estimate as to the delivery time, since often they only have a few people making deliveries and a potentially long queue during busy times. If they have a “pickup at store” option I may go for that - they have my order ready in a bag by name and I just walk in, take it, and go. Minimal if any added risk, and I avoid a 45 minute wait.
Another reason to call the restaurant first is that I’ve found that online delivery portals, in particular my experience with Seamless yesterday, apparently may not know or care if the restaurant is actually operating, believe it or not.
I would have thought in order for them to route orders to a place, they’d have logged on to their system at some point to indicate “ready to take orders”, and then log off when they approach closing time to indicate “not taking any more orders”. But no.
Seamless showed me a list of nearby restaurants with delivery at that time (while also showing that numerous restaurants were NOT able to deliver); took a large order for my family of five; sent me MULTIPLE confirmation emails/notifications about “your order is in process” and and estimated delivery window and contact phone numbers; then, after two hours had passed (double the longest wait time in any estimate), I started calling the numbers they provided, one for the restaurant and one for Seamless customer service. Nobody picked up either one.
I finally drove over to the restaurant, about 5 minutes away, and sure enough it was shuttered.
I get that not every restaurant will be operating as normal for delivery, but showing ones that are not operating AT ALL on their portal, still taking orders for the place, and sending multiple confirmation notifications? WTF?
As for the cooking at home, I’m not afraid to go to the supermarket every 3 days or so to get fresh fruits and vegetables, especially the Fairway where I scan my purchases as I put them into my bag, then do a self-checkout / pay with credit card at the exit and never have to interact with anybody, not even with other customers to line up at a register.
The other specialty supermarket I frequent I do still have to wait in a line for a register, then I simply try to stand apart from other people in line and only use my own credit card to swipe at the payment step (avoiding handing over cash to the register worker). Haven’t gone there in a week or so now.
I don’t have the storage in my house for “stocking up” for 2+ weeks of food at a time for a family of five. Certainly not the refrigerator space, and I would not want to consign myself to canned and dry foods only for an indefinite period of time. The risks are not that bad for going out to shop for fresh food, not for me or to me, at least.
We’re at the other end of the spectrum. We normally eat out 3 to 4 days a week. Take out (usually pizza) another day. Se, we’re definitely cooking at home more than usual now. We don’t have many take out options around here, so that’s out.
Dinner isn’t any different in that the wife (who is an excellent cook) is continuing to prepare hawt cewzine for our dining pleasure. The big difference is breakfast. Since the schools are locked down I no longer grab a breakfast burrito or the like from fast food on the way to work. Eating at home means a lot less fat and salt and stuff like that. The wife commented when I got out of the shower this morning that it looks like I’m losing some weight.
So I got that going for me.
We belong to Dinnerly and Hello Fresh so we get a weekly delivery. Our fridge is actually backed up with food as we were out of town last week for a funeral. There’s no room to put anything more in the fridge or our backup freezer. It’s kind of a good problem to have.
We usually eat dine-in once a week, but we have changed that to curbside pickup instead.
We would normally go to a restaurant or get delivery maybe 1-3 times a week. We are strictly home prep now.
I prepare my own food. Eating out/ordering in is expensive in normal times and these ain’t normal times.
This for me, too. Except for the Sunday dinner with parents thing. We stopped getting invitations after they died.
We’re cooking at home a lot more, but last night we got take-out pizza from our favorite place for the first time since the lockdown started here. The cash register guy told me they’d had two-hour waits for pizza on Saturday night; we had to wait an hour before it was ready for pickup last night, but when I got there there were only two other customers waiting. (We kept an appropriate distance from each other). The cash register guy wanted to take and swipe my credit card, but allowed me to step around the counter and swipe it myself. I didn’t set down the pizza boxes anywhere in our house, but helped my wife transfer the pizza directly to serving plates. Very tasty, too!
Pizza seems to be a particularly popular takeout choice during this thing. There’s a local pizzeria that’s been FBing that they’ve been running out of dough by mid-afternoon every day for the past week.
The local brewpub has looked like they’re doing pretty brisk business too.
I started cooking more for myself at home as I lost weight, and increased my at-home cooking when I started a new job that actually let me be home over the typical dinner hour (I used to work until 7pm, and worked in food service to boot, so I’d just make something to take home). I’m not changing that up now, as A) I don’t really want to spend the money on lots of eating out, and B ) I don’t want to slip back into overeating mode. I do generally let myself pick something up Fridays after work though, so I’m continuing to do that. I have shifted a little bit to visiting (or getting delivery) from places that were formerly sit-down only, to try and help them make it through this quarantine. I figure your regular fast food locations are doing pretty decently, still.
Editing to add that my family and I gave Chilli’s a try on Saturday evening and it was pretty neat. My dad used Doordash and everything arrived even earlier than we were told. I do want to support these business - I just can’t let myself slip back into really bad habits that led to me being obese as a young adult (well, I’m 31, but when I was a YOUNGER adult).
In my town, restaurants are forbidden to serve in the dining room, so I’m doing more take-out than usual.
We almost never ate dinner out, and ate lunch out maybe every two weeks combined with other things. Since we don’t go out anymore, that is gone also.
We both cook, and we both cook stuff better than most restaurant meals, so no need to go out. Since I retired I’ve been cooking at least half the dinners. We had a full freezer at the start of this, and I just got chicken and eggs at the grocery.
So, pretty much no difference.
Ate at home before, eat at home now.
Entirely at home. Normally we’d go out once a week or so.