The rapid rise of Uber Eats and Deliveroo, and many others around the world, shows that it never pays to underestimate the appeal of laziness. Photo / 123RF
COMMENT:
A couple of weekends ago, my wife and I did something unthinkable to many people aged under 40. We ventured out into freezing January streets to spend £25 on seeing a film in thecinema. Even worse — the film will soon be available to watch at home on Netflix, effectively for free.
This gratuitous departure from our sofa allowed us to experience Uncut Gems, a nerve-fraying tale of a jewellery dealer and gambling addict, not just on the big screen but alongside other human beings.
I understand that for many people one of the great joys of Netflix is being able to avoid unruly teens in the row behind or unruly hairstyles in the seat in front. But for me, sharing the adrenalin rush with a room full of equally shell-shocked strangers enhanced the film.
Despite this, like the majority of people, on most evenings I find it hard to resist the ease of simply clicking "play" in an app.
What Netflix has done for movies, food-delivery apps are starting to do for our dining habits. The rapid rise of Uber Eats and Deliveroo, as well as DoorDash in North America and many others around the world, shows that it never pays to underestimate the appeal of laziness.
But though we gain in convenience when our dinner is handed to us from the back of a scooter, we lose in other ways. Just as a trip to the cinema is about more than the moving pictures on the screen, so dining out is about more than what lands on a plate. In both cases, people are as important as place.
As Netflix has shown, the impact of the online world on its offline counterpart is more complex than digital disrupters usually admit. Some researchers have found that younger people — traditionally the most frequent film-goers — are going out to the cinema less often these days. But box-office revenues globally are still increasing, in large part due to higher ticket prices for a smaller number of blockbusters.
If superhero films and franchise sequels are what Hollywood needs to pull in the crowds, it raises the prospect that restaurants in the age of Deliveroo may also need to shift towards the spectacular to persuade people to leave home.
Made-for-Instagram coffee shops, dense with plants and ambitious tiling, have proliferated for years. Hip restaurants experiences in London, such as the grill at Michelin-starred Brat in Shoreditch and Bao's Taiwanese buns, involve cooking techniques and ingredients that are hard to replicate in a regular kitchen — producing food that does not travel well.
Following the Hollywood blockbuster template, some eateries are already veering dangerously close to turning their dining rooms into theme park rides. Dishoom's various London locations aim to transport diners to a Mumbai café, while the walls of Circolo Popolare, a maximalist Italian restaurant in the West End, are stacked high with hundreds of wine bottles, plants and paintings. Both restaurants typically have lines stretching out of the door.
Executives at food-delivery companies argue that they are increasing the number of potential diners that a restaurant can reach. In the same way that Netflix sometimes puts films in cinemas, Deliveroo has even experimented with fine dining.
Three years ago, it offered a three-course menu from Galvin at Windows, a high-end Park Lane establishment, that was designed especially for delivery. It is no longer available but Deliveroo currently lists Trishna, a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in London, and recently added Casa Gloria in Oviedo, northern Spain, whose head chef Nacho Manzano has received two Michelin stars for his other restaurants.
For the most part, however, our food-app habits tend to be more utilitarian. McDonald's is, by some distance, the most popular restaurant on Uber Eats in the UK, while Just Eat recently struck a deal with Greggs, best known for its sausage rolls.
The places at greatest risk of delivery-app disruption are not the Galvins or Trishnas, but the local neighbourhood restaurants — where the food may not be spectacular but the waiter remembers our name and we usually run into an old friend. At some point we need to look up from Instagramming the foliage for long enough to recognise that it's often people who are the secret ingredient.