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“They have become a necessary evil, and I think for many people, evil is the word,” says Stefan Chomka, editor of Restaurant, the leading industry publication for hospitality.
Chomka is referring not to taxes, death or any of the obvious necessary evils in this world, but to restaurants offering a delivery service alongside the traditional dining in.
Deliveries bring no joy to diners, their conversations and their dinners chilled by the constant stream of beeps and draughts that delivery drivers bring into a dining room; and it often brings little joy to the chefs and serving staff, who went into hospitality to present food on plates and serve it to people, not take orders from a screen and send them off on an electric bike.
“If you ask a chef if they would ideally just serve diners, they will say yes,” Chomka continues, but the world of hospitality right now is not an ideal one. People have less money; they go out less; and they work at home more. Younger generations barely drink, and most of them (42 per cent of Gen Z, according to research by the software company Deliverect) would rather order food to their front door rather than set foot in a restaurant’s dining room.
It is all a part of our growing culture of convenience. “People expect to buy food that is in some way prepared for them most days a week, be it by restaurants or middle class delivery ingredients companies or supermarkets,” observes restaurant critic (and restaurateur) Tim Hayward.
“We are yielding our ability to control our own cooking to others and de-skilling ourselves in the process.”
“People would rather click a button than leave the house,” agrees Richard Burghardt, founder of Tex-Mex restaurant D Grande. It’s true of groceries, clothes, furniture — and it’s true of restaurants. “Why people order in is on a long list of ways in which people these days are more inclined to be homebodies than is good for society as a whole. But I sell comfort food and margaritas,” he adds, laughingly. “I’m okay with someone ordering that to their house and brightening their day.”
In short, the state of the world is not the responsibility of restaurateurs. If they’re to survive, they have to adapt to the Pandora’s Box opened in the pandemic — out of necessity.
“You can’t go back. If a 40-cover restaurant needs to be 90 covers on a Saturday because on Friday it only did 10 — because everyone who used to come in on a Friday is working from home post pandemic — then takeaway is essential. That restaurant wouldn’t continue to exist otherwise” Chomka explains.
Indeed, many of the independent restaurants who refused to continue any sort of delivery after lockdown have disappeared. “We might moan about it now, but if it weren’t for delivery we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” he continues. “I am convinced that many, many restaurants out there would have shut down by now if delivery wasn’t still part of their business model.”
One such restaurant is Sambal Shiok, whose proprietor, Mandy Yin, wrote a vigorous defence of restaurant deliveries in the Guardian about a year ago.
She wrote: “Our deliveries account for 10 per cent of our sales most months – that’s not to be sniffed at right now. We have 46 covers, 10 of which are outside, so can’t be used in winter, and even at the best of times we are only making three to five per cent net profit overall.”
As at most restaurants, their margins are wafer-thin, and adding delivery doesn’t necessarily add to their profit. “We swallow the 25 per cent we pay to Deliveroo, so the price you pay to order is the same as you’ll pay in the restaurant. I want to accommodate people who support us,” Lin adds. Besides, as a working mother with a young child, she understands why some customers take away. “Sometimes I’m exhausted. Sometimes I don’t care about the dining experience. Sometimes I just want to be fed.”
In return for her restorative laksa, takeaway customers bring her much needed cash: “The operational costs are so high, you just need cash coming in each month, even if it’s not profit,” she continues.
“It’s load-levelling,” says Burghardt. “If it’s nasty outside, or there’s a Champions League final or other big sporting event on, delivery kicks in and the restaurant slows down. Likewise, if it’s busy in the restaurant, we increase the wait time for deliveries, so we don't downgrade the experience in-house.”
For many restaurants, the problem with takeaway is that it was retro-fitted during Covid rather than being part of their business from the beginning. By way of contrast, pizza delivery pioneers Yard Sale came about the other way round.
“We opened 10 years ago because we saw a gap in the market for high quality delivery pizza,” says co-founder Johnnie Tate. They trained their own drivers, designed their own packaging, and have a tight radius so their pizza neither goes flat nor gets cold. When people chose to eat in, they did so “knowing it was a small pizza shop, where you order at the counter and stay for just 45 minutes for great pizza and good vibes.”
As such, Tate and co-founder Nick Buckland had the luxury of being pleasantly surprised by the volume of people who chose to eat inside their first restaurant in Clapton. It meant that, when they expanded, they could do so in a way that accommodated those diners alongside deliveries, though they remain restaurants second, pizza shops first.
“Less is more, for us,” Tate points out. “We’d rather have fewer tables, and make sure those customers are away from the delivery action as much as possible, and that there’s space for the divers to wait. We see ourselves as buzzy pizza shops where people have the option to dine in. It would definitely be more challenging to operate if you were having to work with third party services, and retrofit delivery onto a restaurant.”
Certainly my experience of dining in some of these retro-fitted restaurants has been of feeling secondary to those customers who (I think, my stomach growling grumpily) can’t be arsed to leave the sofa. Yet as D Grande and Sambal Shiok have shown, it is possible to do both well — and it’s in a restaurateur's best interests.
“A dining customer is worth more at the moment, but a takeaway customer might order every week,” says Chomka. “Both are valuable.”
One of the key advantages of delivery for restaurateurs is that it fills quieter moments in the kitchen, which explains why, when one happens to choose a quiet night to eat out, the disturbance from delivery drivers can feel almost unbearable. But the flipside of this is that if they find themselves busy in-house, the apps allow restaurants to increase the wait time shown online so as to not degrade the experience of their diners.
“Dining in is our top priority,” says Yin. “We’re offering Malaysian laksa, made from scratch, and my staff are ambassadors. Every experience with a customer is a chance to build an understanding with them.”
“Customer service is a huge part of what we offer in the restaurant,” Burghardt concurs. “Our food travels well — burritos, quesos, frozen margaritas — but receiving the plate of fajitas with a tender steak sizzling on a skillet in the restaurant is very different”, as, I might add, is sitting at the bar while bartender Joe shakes up a fresh marg.
“You have to be careful not to degrade the experience, either for delivery customers or for dine in,” he continues, because at their best, the two work hand in hand. “We have people on a regular basis tell us we ordered from you multiple times, so we had to come in.”
My heart isn’t in it. Some of our food travels well, but getting food in a box, removing the plastic wrapping, it’s not very romantic
“Many people find us through Deliveroo,” says Andreas Labridis, the co-founder of the high-end Greek restaurant OPSO in Marylebone.
OPSO is an interesting example of a high-end restaurant which, during lockdown, was forced into takeaway to survive, but didn’t want to compromise its reputation by doing so. “It was a big internal debate, how to offer delivery without damage,” says Labridis.
OPSO isn’t your average Green taverna, with tzatziki and moussaka that can withstand being boxed and biked across town. “There’s a lot of care and technique that goes into our food that wouldn’t easily transfer into takeaway, so we thought we’d do something totally different; something which could fit easily into a box and which people could order often.”
The OPSO at Home offering is the result of the leadership team asking chefs for their favourite Greek comfort dishes: beef stifado, spanakorizo and, yes, tzatziki and moussaka. It was supposed to be temporary, but five years on “it has its own space in the kitchen and three dedicated chefs. It’s a child of Covid that has steadily grown.”
Labridis was right to be cautious. As Hayward says, “home delivery inevitably says something about that restaurant.”
This hasn’t stopped high end restaurants offering it: earlier this year, two Michelin-starred Ikoyi made headlines for partnering with Uber Eats Hosts, a series Uber created to bring rarefied restaurants to their customers. Ikoyi followed Simon Rogan, of L’Enclume, and the Welsh restaurant Ynyshir.
“Three chefs and one front-of-house manager worked on the collaboration at a different location, while the rest of the team remained at Ikoyi to maintain our regular service,” says Ikoyi’s co-founder, Iré Hassan-Odukale, of the £60, five-course menu which was available for a weekend in May within a two mile radius of Charlotte Street.
It did well, though it is telling, perhaps, that every Uber Hosts series has been short and geographically restricted. “It’s not the chef, it’s not the food, it is the restaurant which is awarded a Michelin star,” Hayward points out. “So much of that star is in the experience of being in the room.”
So where next? Hayward isn’t hopeful for the future of consumers or restaurants if we persist in outsourcing the getting of food to underpaid people on bicycles. “Chefs in dark kitchens aren’t getting paid more, staff members aren’t getting paid more, the producers aren’t getting paid more and eventually the price of all this is pushed back to the consumer,” he observes. The only people making money are the people in the middle, running delivery companies. “It’s difficult to see where that ends up.”
For my own part, I’m with Wichet Khongphoon, chef-owner of Supawan in Islington: a beloved, authentic Thai restaurant which did takeaway during lockdown, but now only takes about four delivery orders “on a good night.”
“My heart isn’t in it,” he continues. “Some of our food travels well, but getting food in a box, removing the plastic wrapping, it’s not very romantic! Our customers know that in order to have the maximum benefit from our food they have to experience it in Supawan.”
To Khongphoon, it would feel like a compromise to put more effort into delivery, yet he values the few orders that do come in because he recognises what restaurants mean to people, even when they can’t visit physically. “I had a customer who broke his arm and was craving our food, and he said that when the takeaway arrived, it was like God had sent it to him,” he laughs. It wasn’t the same, but in that time and place it played a role; and as Yin rightly points out: “The primary role of restaurants is first and foremost to restore people.”
