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Food Delivery Made Easier With GrubHub
via Bostonist by Caroline Roberts on March 10, 2008
Has that stack of takeout menus grown unmanageable? Did you forget which pizza place has the best pepperoni? GrubHub can solve that problem for you. All you need to do is type in your address, and you'll get a list of all the dining establishments that will deliver to your home, along with their menus.When you open an account with GrubHub, you can even keep a virtual menu drawer with Past Orders, Favorite Menus, My Reviews, and Account Info. Even better, you are able to order the food you want through GrubHub and leave notes to the delivery driver about how to access your building.
Does it work? A hungry Bostonist tried it out. GrubHub has deals with restaurants whose logos are visible on the site. However, we didn't think enough restaurants offered online ordering. hen we hit the "Online Ordering" button, the number of selections dropped from over 140 to 8 in our neighborhood. That said, several restaurants whose delivery Bostonist knows to be super-fast did appear on the list. Even if you can't order online, a menu will appear along with the phone number. When it's all over, you can rate and review the service.
In our test, Bostonist ordered from an unnamed Chinese food establishment that GrubHub has a deal with. We were able to click off our menu choices. Then, after placing the order, it took four steps until we knew we would get our meal: Preparing to transmit, restaurant acknowledges the order, then you get the delivery time, and the order is confirmed.
More adventures with GrubHub after the jump!
Once the order was confirmed, we were told that we would get our order in an hour and ten minutes, which was depressing. However, the restaurant actually delivered in 40 minutes. The food was warm, we received exactly what we asked for, minus one fortune cookie. GrubHub now has our choice saved so we can access the same meal again on nights when it's really cold or we're really lazy.
We had to ask founder Matt Maloney what he went through to get all of the menus for the restaurants. He said in an e-mail, "We really have called every restaurant in Chicago, San Fran, and Boston."
Bostonist then asked Maloney how Bostonians were reacting to the GrubHub idea, especially since the weather keeps us cooped up for so long: "So far Boston's been wonderful. Your restaurateurs are very cool and everyone I've talked to on the street is excited to go online and give it a shot. In such a young and vibrant place, new ideas (when they're good) catch on really fast. That's one of the reasons we chose to come here... that and the crappy weather that we share."
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