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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I believe all of this but:

Food that travels well requires different recipes, different ingredients, different packaging.

This doesn't ring true, given the popularity of DoorDash and the fact that most of those restaurant menus are in no way optimized for delivery.

Having lower-quality multitasking staff serving multiple restaurants from the same prep and equipment seems like an obvious way to lose quality. But simply streamlining the process of getting a menu onto delivery? That seems like a solved problem.

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> This doesn't ring true, given the popularity of DoorDash and the fact that most of those restaurant menus are in no way optimized for delivery.

People have really funny ideas about restaurants. Somebody once left an online review of my family's establishment complaining that the hot chicken that was supposed to be on their cold to-go salad was in a separate container. They asserted that it was a "trick" to keep the chicken warm and moist, as though it would have been better to let the hot poultry heat their salad in the same container until it was lukewarm meat on top of wilted greens. Every day I wake up and mourn the IQ point that I lost reading it.

But it is a trick, it's just that it's a good trick.

"Wilted soggy salad lovers hate this one simple trick!"

I saw this the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/chicagofood/comments/1na3fer/commen...

So some places are optimizing their fries for delivery.

I've also noticed some restaurants are better at adapting the packaging, like punching out ventilation so fried products don't steam themselves in transit. Lawrence Seafood (which rules) did that for a side of tempura we got this weekend.

But I agree in large part. I wouldn't order fried chicken delivered via door dash in any event. People doing that are optimizing for something other than quality.

The increasing prevalence of battered fries as a consequence of DoorDash is such a cursed thing.

Ten years ago (I moved since), there was a ghost kitchen in the Bay Area that was great. I wish I could remember the name. But it produced meals that were extremely well packaged, but designed to be reheated at home (it took like 15 min max). It was great because the meals could be pre-ordered and delivered by the time you got home. You could tell the recipes were all tweaked to fit the specifics of delivery and reheating.

This was an example of a well functioning ghost kitchen. I don’t know how profitable they were, but it was very convenient. There are a lot of downsides to this approach, like pre ordering, reheating, and limited menu, but it was a very different approach to current ghost kitchens around me now or DoorDash from a local restaurant.

The ghost kitchen model can work if the meal recipes are optimized for being microwave heated at destination before consumption. So pre-cooked, but not hot during transport. This allows a more reliable quality for the customer. This allows the kitchen to prepare in advance, also reducing waste.

I think Lazy Dog does that and calls them TV dinners.

The elephant in the room is people who rely on doordash are not passionate cooks or very discerning customers.

Yeah. Or they didn't have the luxury of being discerning and just need cooked food delivered.

I can't remember when I last used a service like that. The convenience isn't worth the disappointment and aggravation.

> the fact that most of those restaurant menus are in no way optimized for delivery.

Are you sure they're not?

Yes, I am sure about this claim that I am making. Are there restaurants that do optimize for delivery? Certainly. But DoorDash covers most restaurants in my area (and it's a big area --- Chicagoland) and most of those menus are identical to the in-person menu.

Every greasy spoon I frequent now has all sorts of packaging/to-go options, they're self-branding the cups and boxes, they have separate queues for pick-up/delivery orders, they have cubbies for quick pick-up, whatever -- they're all seemingly optimizing for pick-up/online stuff.

> This doesn't ring true, given the popularity of DoorDash and the fact that most of those restaurant menus are in no way optimized for delivery.

People are dumb.... but only for so long. I've been burnt so many times by delivery I've gone back to mostly ordering pizza and picking it up in person.

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