I live in a metro area, but not close enough to the city to be really urban. So food delivery is limited. We have sandwich, pizza and chinese and thai delivery options. We’re sick of the usual things. Which makes me wonder why none of the italian, indian, french restaurants ever deliver food. They all have dishes that travel well. Certainly pasta or curry won’t get soggy like the bread in a hot sandwich or the pizza crust will. Anybody know or have opinions on why this is the case?
I’ve always wondered this, but I recently figured it out; people won’t order other kinds of food for delivery.
I’ve lived in and around Toronto for years, a huge metro area, and there have been a lot of efforts to create delivery services for other kinds of food. Almost all have been failures, with only three really notable exceptions:
- Swiss Chalet, a chain of cheap roasted chicken restaurants, has a fairly successful delivery service,
- Wings Up! will bring you wings (and they’re pretty good) and
- There’s a delivery service that serve a LOT of restaurants, and it seems to be hanging on, but to be honest I know no one who uses it and can’t even recall its name right now.
The question is why are people willing to order in pizza or Chinese but not tacos? I have no idea.
Well, French is right out, for obvious reasons. But Indian delivery seems like it would work. You can get Italian from most chain pizza places these days.
Wild thought: it might have something to do with how well the delivered items work refrigerated and served the next day.
If you have eat24, delivery.com or similar services you should be able to get delivery. I regularly get sushi, Italian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and about anything else delivered through those services.
In San Francisco, we are bombarded with ads for multiple food delivery services that deliver from a huge variety of restaurant types. Not sure about your location, but you might want to check out seamless, grubhub or doordash in addition to eat24 to see if they will serve you.
In Seattle, Uber has been experimenting with food delivery at lunchtime, albeit with a very limited menu.
Most large urban cities have delivery services that will order you anything from any restaurant that will prepare “food to go”. You call the delivery service, tell them what you want, they call and order from the restaurant, go pick it up and deliver it to you. You pay the full amount plus a delivery fee and tip.
Unfortunately, the OP specifies that she doesn’t live in an urban area. Just a metro one.
Do these restaurants even do take-out? If they’re not even offering take-out, they’re almost certainly not going to offer delivery.
Does KFC deliver in most of the US? They do in Panama, as do other local chicken chains. KFC seems to deliver in other overseas locations too.
MacDonald’s does delivery here too.
I’m in the burbs, and besides the usual pizza/Chinese, I can get Peruvian chicken or Ethiopian food.
When I was in the city, I could get basically anything through Seamless or Foodler. I think this type of service has really changed things.
I’ve been using DoorDash a lot and they just added KFC to their repertoire.
I was in college thirty years ago in upstate New York. The local McDonalds started a delivery service, as a sort of experiment. The big issue for them was keeping the french fries hot but not getting soggy. The big issue for me was that the minimum order was five dollars and, at the time, this was more food than I could eat on my own, so it only worked if I went in on an order with someone else.
The one I see signs for is “Just Eat”.
My wife owns a fast food restaurant that does catering deliveries. She considers delivering food a hassle, albeit a sometimes profitable hassle. The annoying thing is that it diverts an employee away from work and, in her case, delivery orders don’t come regularly enough to have a dedicated employee doing the delivering.
You can get everything in New York, but you all knew that already.
I limit my order-in to pizza, Chinese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese sandwiches, Mexican. A lot of things don’t travel well. French fries SUCK unless they’re fresh out of the fryer.
I have no idea why your local pizza places don’t also deliver Italian cuisine. Usually any pizza place that delivers does Italian dinners too, except for the national chains. And even Pizza Hut has pasta now.
I would love some delivered Thai.
Our local “we’ll deliver for anybody” place is called Takeout Taxi. They cost a lot, but one night I got to craving shrimp scampi very strongly while at work, so I had them deliver from a place on the other side of the city.
There was a short-lived place that delivered tacos.
Indian restaurants deliver in Britain, and indeed even shove menus through the letterbox now and then.
Like every week.
We’ve tried some of the delivery services like Takeout Taxi. For some reason, even though they say they deliver to our town, when we get them on the phone and tell them our address, they’re like “sorry, you’re outside of our delivery area”. We live in a very nice, low-crime area so that’s not the problem, but they seem to have excluded our neighborhood.
Well, first world problem, I know.
We have an Indian delivery place near us, depending where you live in the US, they’re not that uncommon. I’ve never had a good experience ordering from services like Takeout Taxi or Eat24, the food arrives ice cold and way too late.
Another problem with the delivery services; they often have commissions or delivery charges, or minimum order amounts. I’m usually just getting enough food for me, so prefer to avoid minimum order requirements. So I would rather drive to the restaurant and pick up takeout.
But these services are great when we’re ordering a bunch of food for a meeting or group lunch at work. I think that’s a big part of their business.