S.F. restaurants come to where the diners are
A tent on the side of a highway. A dark parking lot in an empty downtown. Inside a highend liquor store. Outside a synagogue.
These are among the sometimes nondescript locations where some of San Francisco’s most enticing restaurants are serving customers who no longer frequent the city. With the pandemic keeping commuters at home in places like Oakland, Mill Valley and Mountain View, restaurants have begun going directly to them. Some say this new sort of delivery helped save their businesses during a trying year — and the trend has sparked a fleet of locally grown startups looking to connect restaurants to customers
across the region long after the pandemic is over.
Last fall, SF2Bay started bringing Pizzeria Delfina’s famed Neapolitan pies and fresh pastas to hungry fans in Marin County. Now, the startup works with four restaurants with regular pickup locations in Mill Valley, Piedmont and Lafayette. TuangoEats got started around the same time but has grown faster: The tech company serves food from 25 restaurants at 13 pickup locations that are primarily south of San Francisco. The plan is to add 10 more cities by the end of the year and eventually offer a pickup location within 2.5 miles of every neighborhood in the Bay Area.
Meanwhile, a similar idea has cropped up within San Francisco: Benne currently brings restaurant food to six pickup spots but aims to be in every neighborhood. With many requests coming in from outside the city, Benne is considering branching out, too.
These providers say they’re solving a problem in the dining landscape that other models can’t. Diners may be curious about a restaurant 45 minutes away but not want to make the long drive. For restaurants, thirdparty delivery apps like DoorDash only reach diners a few miles away, effectively “competing for the same customer group but also charging a 30% commission on top,” said Dan Lee, cofounder of TuangoEats. (Many Bay Area municipalities have temporarily capped these fees at 15% during the pandemic.)
Even as more people get vaccinated and indoor dining rebounds, Lee and others argue that the need will remain. Diners in the suburbs will still drive into San Francisco less often, and they may be getting bored with their nearby options. Plus, the delivery sector was already booming prepandemic, said Tracey Forster of SF2Bay. A 2019 study for the National Restaurant Association found that 60% of restaurant dining was offsite via drivethrough, delivery or takeout.
“We believe this type of model is going to expand and evolve over time,” she said. “This is the wave of the future.”
San Francisco Israeli hub Frena Bakery filled its van with pillowy pita, creamy hummus and savory pastries last March after seeing downtown empty out and its revenue plunge. The team drove daily to cities like Palo Alto and Berkeley, setting up a table outside for a couple of hours and then taking off to the next location.
“That saved the business,” owner Isaac Yosef said. “If we didn’t do it, we would probably be bankrupt.”
Demand has fallen since the early days, but people still come to the Frena van — which now also sells food from its sister restaurant, Hummus Bodega — every week. Some of these customers used to frequent Frena in San Francisco, but now have no reason to be in the city. Others had never tried the bakery before. Now, Yosef says he’ll likely keep up the van routes indefinitely, even increasing the frequency this summer for the highestdemand regions, like the South Bay.
Regulars are also coming to Pizzeria Delfina’s SF2Bayorchestrated pickups in Marin County every week — consistently high orders led the San Franciscoborn restaurant group to buy 30 giant coolers that fit 30 pizzas each. For three weeks near Hanukkah, the restaurant also brought latkes.
“The sales were incredible — better than a Saturday night preCOVID at one of our pizzerias,” said coowner Annie Stoll.
Stoll isn’t certain Marin customers will still want Pizzeria Delfina’s parbaked pies postpandemic, but the restaurant will continue with SF2Bay as long as people show up.
Rintaro owner Sylvan Mishima Brackett feels similarly unsure. He’s been dropping off bento boxes at Oakland spirits shop Alkali Rye weekly as well as distributing makeyourown handroll kits via Benne — both efforts have helped Rintaro break even, but takeout sales have generally been dropping in recent weeks. Whether Rintaro continues with these models will likely demand on bandwidth.
“If we’re really busy in the restaurant, it’s logistically challenging,” he said. “We have special boxes, special wrappers, everything is packaged in a certain way.”
Brackett likes working with local small businesses, though. While he said the cost of Benne is similar to a delivery app under San Francisco’s current fee caps, he trusts Benne to handle his food with care. Similarly, Stoll described SF2Bay’s cost as similar to delivery apps but with greater return.
They also appreciate the overarching goal of enabling more diners to support local restaurants while maintaining quality. That’s why Benne takes more of a meal kit approach to its service, with light preparation required for dishes like Nopa’s classic cheeseburgers and the Morris’ smoked duck.
Benne founder Michael Molesky said he wants to dismantle the idea that ondemand delivery is the holy grail of convenience. Postpandemic, he sees these options as an enduring need, in part because they make San Francisco’s top restaurants more accessible to families.
“If you’ve got a couple kids, no matter how much you love Mister Jiu’s, it’s going to be hard to get a reservation, drive, park and keep the kids in line to have the dining experience you want,” he said. “Here, you can actually have agency: You can get exactly the dishes you crave and make them on your own time.”