Lazy foodies, awkward drivers and angry chefs: Food delivery apps boom in Sacramento

Food delivery has always seemed like a big city thing. More hustle-and-bustle East Coast than leisurely-lunch-on-a-sun-dappled West Coast patio. I can thank TV for that perception. For years, plotlines about takeout have figured prominently on shows such as Seinfeld and Sex in the City, reinforcing the cliché of delivery being the refuge of the harried professional in the seventh-floor Manhattan walk-up.

But recently that cliché has proven true in Sacramento with the downtown and Midtown areas (and somewhat beyond) witnessing an explosion of delivery options.

Sacramento has long had business behemoth GrubHub to turn to—its service is offered in nearly 1,000 cities nationwide. Now, within just the last eight months, the San Francisco-based Postmates and Caviar have also joined the 916 fray, while local upstart FoodJets promises to get diners food in 10 minutes or less.

There’s also the lesser-known, nonmobile-friendly Food To You, as well as the quirky, locally based indie delivery service Edible Pedal.

So many choices—all of which lead to why I, a person who generally walks or bikes to restaurants several times a week and never gets delivery, am now sitting in a Midtown apartment with an ex-New Yorker, waiting for some FoodJets entrees to arrive.

My friend Alison Dolan lived in Manhattan for more than nine years, and during that time got meals delivered, either to her home or office, at least two or three times a week. Dolan points out that there, with the city’s inclement weather, lack of cars and just generally exhausting pace, it made sense to get delivery.

Here in Sacramento, Dolan works from home and can’t really take lengthy breaks from the phone and computer, so she still frequently gets food brought to her house. Caviar is her favorite service, thanks to the artfully photographed food featured on its app, but she’s also excited to try FoodJets.

The company’s snappily branded, befinned orange-and-blue cars have been hard to miss since the Sacramento-based business took flight last October. The company was launched by Darren McAdams, who also runs Food To You.

FoodJet’s association between meals and airlines is perhaps not the most appetizing one, calling to mind flavorless pucks of protein drowning in a red or brown sauce. The food itself did not dispel this impression. It’s delivered hot, and there’s a lot of it, but as we eat, our thoughts lead to comments such as “It’s not horrible” and “Well, it’s edible.”

The chalky enchiladas suizas were accompanied by refried beans that evoked half-dried concrete, the chicken Florentine was inferior to a Lean Cuisine and the kung pao chicken was salty and rubbery. The app lists entrees on a menu that rotates daily, and its FAQ section claims the food is made “by some of the best local restaurants.” If so, such restaurants would be wise to disavow an association.

Upscale Caviar, with its Instagram-worthy natural-light photos, really does offer a curated list of well-regarded local restaurants, such as LowBrau, Hot Italian and Federalist Public House. Caviar was founded in 2012 by four UC Berkeley alumni who met in a frat and had some hefty initial financial backing, including from Cameron and Norton Winklevoss, the twin venture capitalists perhaps best known for their legal tanglings with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In 2014, Caviar was purchased by the online-payment company Square for $90 million.

A testimonial video aimed at restaurateurs on Caviar’s website makes it clear that it wants to be known as the delivery app for foodies with chef James Syhabout of Oakland’s Hawker Fare praising Caviar’s freshness.

“The lettuce isn’t getting wilted, the food’s … still aromatic,” Syhabout says in the video. “[It’s] as if the diner’s couch is in the restaurant.”

Likewise, celebrity ramen guru Ivan Orkin says that on some days up to 20 percent of the business at his New York namesake Ivan Ramen comes from Caviar orders.

He’ll need that volume because the Caviar business model works by taking a cut from the restaurateur. The service currently only delivers to 16 cities, most of them food meccas; Hot Italian co-owner Andrea Lepore, who worked with Caviar for more than a year at Hot Italian’s Emeryville location, urged the company to come to Sacramento.

“They are a very professional company, well-funded, and have a lot of drivers. The food is delivered to our high standards, on time and hot,” Lepore said.

My order of a prosciutto-and-arugula-topped Fiori pizza from Hot Italian arrived in less than 30 minutes, with the crust retaining the key textural interplay between crispy and chewy. The old-school chopped romaine Belinelli salad was delivered unwilted with red wine dressing on the side. A quick toss with two wooden spoons in a salad bowl made me glad to be enjoying this restaurant-quality meal at home, with a bottle of red wine from my cellar.

We ordered another meal on Caviar, this time from a place that didn’t fit as well in the upscale selection. A delivery from Broadway institution Los Jarritos yielded a typically greasy, cheesy chicken taco platter. This is a good thing.

When I asked my Caviar driver about tips, he informed me that about 20 to 30 percent of his customers tip, and then rang the doorbell five minutes later to correct himself. The amount of people who tip, he told me, is actually just 10 to 15 percent. He then offered my tip back in apology for “lying.”

Uh, no dude, that’s OK. Chicken tacos with a side of awkward.

If hipster Caviar is like the Instagram of food apps, GrubHub is more like Myspace. The app is visually chaotic, with tiny logos representing numerous local restaurants. Inexplicably, on a Tuesday evening the fastest advertised delivery time offered was 45 minutes—even for a restaurant located mere blocks from my house. The longest projected wait was 130 minutes.

Starving post-spin class, I ended up ordering from Bombay Bar and Grill, crossing my fingers that it would arrive more quickly than the estimated hour. A status update on the app reassured me that my meal was “in the works,” but then I panicked as it didn’t update for 25 minutes.

In the end, the food arrived within 35 minutes. The creamy, hearty, saucy style of Indian food that Bombay traffics in lends itself particularly well to delivery and our chana sag and Bombay masala arrived steaming hot.

Bombay co-owner Harman Bhandal said that up to 25 percent and possibly more of their business comes from delivery and that “it’s an easy way for people to find us … these services work really well.”

GrubHub is workmanlike but uninspiring; in contrast, upstart company Postmates is inspiring vitriol in some local chefs.

Mother and Empress Tavern chef Mike Thiemann has been particularly fired up about the service, decrying it as “market capitalism at its weakest. Like many services, Postmates makes its money by tacking on service and delivery fees.

“It’s like a business built a door in front of my business with a different set of rules and standards,” Thiemann said. “[It] makes money every time someone goes through that door to get to ours.”

Many local chefs, including Thiemann, also don’t like Postmates because of the lack of control they have over how and when the food is delivered.

Billy Ngo says he doesn’t mind people using it for his fast-casual poke spot Fish Face, but it’s not a good fit for his upscale sushi restaurant Kru—although he won’t go as far as refusing Postmate’s orders, as Thiemann and some other chefs have.

“First priority goes to our dine-in guests, but if they are willing to wait an hour for to-go [from Kru], I’ll take it,” Ngo said.

Thiemann complains that Postmates grabs images from his restaurant’s social media accounts without permission, and he’s not alone with that concern. He’s even gone as far as to threaten legal action to get the images of Mother’s food taken down.

When contacted for comment, Postmates’ Director of Communications April Conyers seemed bewildered as to why the chef was still angry about the delivery service months after its launch.

“[It’s] kind of weird to me,” she said. The company made some missteps when it first entered the market, Conyers says, but now they are “definitely much quicker to remove restaurants when they just don’t want to be a part of it.”

She acknowledges that some chefs bemoan the lack of control, but adds that those chefs have an opportunity to partner with Postmates, and in exchange for a cut of their profits (between 15 and 20 percent, similar to other apps) are granted total control, including the ability to pause orders if they get behind, and to integrate the Postmates order into their point of sale software.

“There’s no exchange of money, the Postmate literally walks in and grabs the bag and walks out,” she said.

Postmates’ current default policy is to add restaurants to its app—and then remove them upon request.

And those Uber-like Postmate star ratings solicited after delivery?

“We take a look at every low rating and either go back to the merchant … or we work with the Postmate. … Quality to us is everything,” Conyers said. “From our perspective if we deliver food that’s not in good shape, you’re not going to order again, so that’s not good for anyone.”

My first Postmates meal from Orchid Thai arrived—in good shape—and within 35 minutes. The bland lettuce-stuffed spring rolls came sans the promised sauce but Sriracha doctored them up. I purposely introduced a wrinkle for a more complicated order from 58 Degrees and Holding Co.: Some of the menus available through Postmates nonpartners are not up-to-date, so I chose a trio of bruschetta I knew was not on the current menu to see how my Postmate would handle it; I also added a custom request for a $20 bottle of wine.

The bruschetta order turned out to be no big deal. Within three minutes of placing the order, I received a phone call from my Postmate, Vanessa, who wanted to make sure the available seasonal bruschetta substitution would be OK.

Vanessa also picked out a decent pinot noir from the Santa Lucia Highlands in the Monterey area. It’s a bit of a cult wine that came at a good price, although at $25 it was $5 higher than the price limit I’d requested.

Unlike GrubHub and other services, Postmates can, theoretically, deliver almost anything. For example, one night I had two six-packs of beer—Lagunitas IPA and Pacifico—dispatched to a punk show. Instant hero! Technically, the company is supposed to ask for ID but I guess I looked old enough for my driver to skip the procedure.

Local bike service Edible Pedal doesn’t deliver for very many businesses, but it has inspired intense loyalty in those who partner with it. Ed Roehr, who owns Magpie, Nido and Yellowbill, has worked with Edible Pedal for more than four years and says he prefers it to any other such service.

“I like the bicycle aspect and we trust them to make sure the food gets there in one piece. … We recommend that people use them rather than putting another car on the road.”

Owner John Boyer said that he’s “obviously not too happy” about the explosion of other delivery apps after working for five years to build his delivery service, which is accessed through calling participating restaurants and asking that the food be delivered via Edible Pedal.

“[The apps] don’t train people to love the food they’re delivering. I train my people to be an extension of the restaurants,” he says. “I drill them about the quality and what’s at stake, i.e. how much is organic, how much is local, so that they’re invested.”

The company also uses what it claims are higher-quality insulated, zippered bags so that the food stays as warm or cold as possible before its delivery.

When I tried it out, an Enchanted Forest juice from Sun & Soil Juice Co. took more than an hour to arrive and rang in at the decadent price of $14 (Edible Pedal’s standard flat $5 delivery fee on top of the $9 juice), but it was still cold and refreshingly minty. A turkey sandwich from Magpie would have arrived within the promised window of time, but was a scant few minutes late because the driver had forgotten the bottle of Zeal Kombucha and had to double back.

Although Roehr prefers Edible Pedal, he has no specific quibble with any of the other services.

“There’s something inevitable about the explosion in food delivery. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.”

Now that I’ve opened the Pandora’s box of delivery in researching this piece it’s harder for me to venture out on that rainy evening, or at the end of the workday after I’ve already taken off my bra and put on the comfortable yoga pants.

After all of that eating, what have I learned? From a bit of trial and error, I’ve stumbled on the revolutionary idea that the quintessential delivery food is … pizza. Preferably from Hot Italian. Delivered by bike.