Chef ’s new concept: fine dining, delivery only
There was only one way, Anthony Strong decided, to test dishes for one of the country’s first chef-driven, delivery-only restaurants. “I was putting bags in my car and driving across town to my girlfriend’s house,” he said, adding that he would take the hilliest routes across San Francisco.
Young Fava, which debuts early this summer, will have no storefront sign, no dining room and no wine list. Strong isn’t even waiting to sign a lease on his own kitchen space before opening, working out of a pho shop. He plans to run his virtual restaurant as he did Pizzeria Delfina and Locanda, however, preparing dishes to order. Only instead of dispatching a server to bring the food to diners, he’ll hand it off to a driver.
Young restaurateurs like Strong, confronted by the Bay Area’s rising rents and wages, are increasingly looking for new ways to build a successful, sustainable business, including temporary pop-ups, food trucks and counter-service fine dining. So a brave few are now attempting delivery. Given the ubiquity of delivery services such as Caviar and DoorDash, does it matter whether a restaurant’s doors are open to the public?
Strong, 34, is well known in Bay Area food circles for the 11 years he spent cooking Italian food for the Delfina Restaurant Group, where he rose to corporate executive chef before leaving five months ago. When it came time to step out on his own, he decided that the Bay Area doesn’t need another Italian restaurant. “Where can I really nerd out and just make a risky, creative move?” he asked himself. The answer involved designing custom boxes and coming up with food that would taste delicious after sitting inside them for 20 minutes.
Online delivery services are an afterthought for high-end chefs, a lifeline for mom-andpop restaurants, a welcome convenience for diners — and a massive industry. GrubHub reported selling $898 million worth of food in the first quarter of 2017 alone. Online delivery services are expanding: According to trade publication Apptopia, UberEats is making deliveries in 80 cities, DoorDash in 350 and the Yelpowned Eat24 in 1,500.
But other well-funded companies, like Sprig and Munchery, that once promised to disrupt the restaurant industry by delivering meals at affordable costs have flailed. SpoonRocket and Bento have shut down. The latest failure was Maple, which closed this past week. Backed by New York celebrity chef David Chang and an estimated $50 million in investment, it was forced to raise prices to become profitable and saw sales tumble as a result.
Strong hopes that smaller, independent ventures like Young Fava, which is translating the mid-priced neighborhood bistro into a coffeetable, paper-plate dining experience at home, will fare better.
Evan Kuo, owner of Pythagoras, has watched these well-funded giants falter while his delivery-only San Francisco pizzeria chugs along. He thinks that the big companies charged too little and offered customers simple, everyday food. “You have to produce a premium product that you can charge a high-ticket price for,” Kuo said.
Pythagoras started as a bare-bones mobile app that Kuo, an engineer and computer programmer, built to call orders in to his local pizza shop. In 2015, an experienced pizzaiolo, who is no longer with the company, helped Kuo turn the app into a deliveryonly pizzeria, becoming in essence an artisanal Domino’s.
After months of testing crusts that would taste good after 20 minutes in transit, Pythagoras went live in October 2015. Customers place orders through their phones, and the company bakes pizzas in an anonymous commercial kitchen in the Mission, delivering to locations in a 2-mile radius.
Kuo said being a virtual restaurant saves money on staff and location. But employing drivers or paying Postmates during peak times costs far more than Pythagoras’s $3 “delivery fee.” He builds the rest of the price into the $23 he charges per 14-inch pie.
Baba Afolabi, who owns the Oakland-based Chop Plentii, sees delivery as his path to opening a West African restaurant in the Bay Area.
Afolabi moved to California from Nigeria 19 years ago. Chop Plentii was inspired by his soccer teammates, who would give him money to pass on to his mother, Ayoola Lawal, in exchange for a container of soup. Afolabi has been looking for a way to turn these meals into a full-time business ever since. He and his mother ran a pop-up last year out of a downtown Oakland juice bar.
The problem is that Afolabi has little access to the capital he needs to open a small restaurant, even a food truck. “I’ve known a couple of West African restaurants that have opened and closed,” Afolabi said. “It’s not because their food isn’t good. They don’t have enough money to keep them afloat until people find them.”
He currently runs Chop Plentii as a weekly meal-delivery service, which takes orders by text message or Google Doc, while he builds Chop Plentii’s website.
Afolabi is designing the site himself, paying coders to adapt an e-commerce template from Shopify to fit his menu. Afolabi anticipates that Chop Plentii will begin taking online orders for weekly deliveries and daily lunches in a month or two, delivering only in the East Bay. He will start with Nigerian classics like jollof rice, pepper soup and egusi, a stew of greens and ground melon seeds. Eventually, he hopes to add cuisines from other African countries.
Domino’s aside, deliveryonly restaurants are so new that their owners are operating with few guidelines. How do you convince investors that the business is viable? How much can you spend on ingredients or kitchen space? Most critically, how do you let diners know you’re there?
Young Fava’s Strong is trying to figure out how to reach new customers and persuade them to return, especially since diners will order through UberEats, Caviar, DoorDash and Postmates instead of his own website.
“You’re building a lot of ways a digital marketing brand as you are a food brand,” said Anoop Pillarisetti, head of experience at Ando in New York, perhaps the highest-profile delivery restaurant in the country, owned by David Chang, also of Maple. “In our perspective, the top of our priority list is making delicious food, making sure customers are excited and willing to share it.” For Ando, that’s cheesesteaks, fried chicken and salads that can withstand 30 minutes in a bike courier’s bag.
Strong is aiming for more complex, less workaday food — making it perhaps the first delivery-only bistro in the United States. Salads with dressing on the side travel well, naturally. He’s come up with shareable dishes like burrata cheese whipped with caramelized spring onions, paired with Tartine bread; as well as Korean-style rice cakes, which don’t lose their chew in the box, with mushroom ragu and pine nuts.
“I want takeout and delivery to be a bit more approachable and fit into people’s lives rather than popping open some weird creepy container and being embarrassed by its presence,” Strong said.
He estimates that Young Fava’s average check price will be equivalent to a meal at a mid-priced restaurant. The key question will be: Will enough San Franciscans want to pay $40 a person for a weeknight meal in boxes to keep the restaurant afloat? In addition, he has to forgo liquor sales, a source of profit for most restaurants.
Pythagoras’ Kuo shared more cautions. “If you’re relying on UberEats or Postmates or DoorDash to drive volume, it’s most likely not going to be enough volume on their own,” he said. “So you have to acquire customers on your own.”
Strong does have one advantage: name recognition among chef-watchers. Having no celebrity chef, Kuo said, has slowed his company’s growth. Most of Pythagoras’ new customers signed up after encountering his pizza at a friend’s house.
“It’s one thing to build a tech business that’s serving food and a delivery operation,” said Ando’s Pillarisetti. “At the end of the day we’re building a restaurant and a place for people to get food from.”
At the moment, before the challenge of making a profit overtakes him, Strong is relishing the challenge of creating food destined for a cardboard box.
“How often do chefs get to do something actually new?” he said.