
David Chang's New Startup: A Restaurant Without the Restaurant - JrobertsHstaff
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/maple-david-chang/
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dbot
I don't see many people talk about the packaging and food quality at the time
of delivery. This is the absolute biggest factor for overall satisfaction.
They mention trying to optimize delivery, but that only helps so much.

If you are doing high-end food, it need to travel extremely well. Having tried
a lot of food delivery services - with both first- and third-party drivers - I
rarely order anything other than pizza or Chinese food for delivery anymore.

Pizza places, Jimmy Johns, and many Chinese food restaurants have perfected
the food experience and delivery network. But the truth is, their products are
pretty average.

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mathattack
New York has very standards too. The weak service that companies like DoorDash
pull (cold food after an hour wait) won't fly in NYC.

I think this has been tried in the past.
[http://www.grubstreet.com/2011/05/introducing_savory_a_deliv...](http://www.grubstreet.com/2011/05/introducing_savory_a_delivery-.html)

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rjett
Interesting. By getting rid of front of house, that eliminates on average 80%
of the square footage needed to be a full service restaurant, and they can vie
for non-premium properties, so rent will be much cheaper. That said, all else
is pretty much the same as any other restaurant business. Delivery drivers
replace front of house workers on almost a one for one basis. Kitchen buildout
is the same cost. And customers will be customers until they have their first
bad experience.

They're playing a volume game. And without alcohol sales, they'll need a lot
of volume. So then the question is this: Does "fancy food" from a high end
chef like David Chang have a wide enough appeal to solicit the type of volume
needed for this to be successful? I suspect it does in pockets of NYC. From a
higher vantage point, I'm less optimistic.

Restaurants are about more than food though. Their job is to set a stage with
design, lighting, music, background noises, service, plating, and conversation
amongst other human beings. That's why people pay $1000 for a bottle of wine,
$45 for a New York Strip, or $4.50 for a cup of coffee. If we didn't care
about these other things, we would all be getting delivery, making our own
food, or eating out of vending machines and paying 75% less to do so.

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vonmoltke
> If we didn't care about these other things, we would all be getting
> delivery, making our own food, or eating out of vending machines and paying
> 75% less to do so.

My delivery options are very limited, and vending machine food is almost
universally terrible. I cook a lot, and like it. However, sometimes I do not
have the time or do not want to devote the time to cook, so I go to a
restaurant. Plus, there are some things I can't do well at home for lack of
equipment. For those cases, I go to a restaurant. I don't care much about
design and lighting, hate having what most places call music, don't like much
background noise, and really don't care what the food looks like on the plate.
It is a predominantly functional experience for me. Some of my favorite
restaurants are very Spartan affairs.

Now, I have no idea how typical I am and suspect it varies based on location.
I am probably closer to typical here in Dallas than I would be in NYC.

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michael_h
> costs $12 with tip and delivery included

Whoa, putting _all_ the charges in the advertised price? Madness!

Seriously though, I wish this was the norm.

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beat
Pricing transparency is one of the nice things that has come out of the mobile
revolution. I think it'll become more and more common.

For an alternative vision, Chicago's Alinea restaurant (with 3 Michelin stars,
one of the greatest restaurants in the world, possibly _the_ greatest in
America) has gone from traditional reservations to a ticket-based model. You
buy tickets in advance for your meal, like you would a sporting event or a
concert. Tickets aren't refundable, but they're transferable. That's a
fascinating model, at least for a restaurant that can be jampacked full with
wait times running out weeks or months in advance.

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mod
Are the tickets entry-only? Then presumably you pay for your meal as well?

Perhaps you could just pay for drinks, I guess, and have the meal on the
ticket. I assume their price covers all your typical upcharges anyway.

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beat
The tickets are for the meal. Meal runs like $300 per person or so... I'll
find out later this year, when I plan to buy tickets for my daughter and
myself. She's a budding chef, and we should eat at the most powerful
restaurant we can one of these days!

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GauntletWizard
How is this different from Little Caesars or Dominos business model, except
being app-only instead of phone-call based? My local dominos barely has a
pick-up window as it's storefront. There's always a delivery guy pulling in or
out.

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beat
How is BMW's business model different from Hyundai's?

Upscale experience matters.

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spiritplumber
That's the part I don't understand.

Why do people spend $600 for a phone that they use to do stuff a $80 phone
does, except the $80 phone has an effectively better battery and often gets
better signal?

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ryanx435
marketing. brand positioning.

people filter out the products that are not good enough on their own. they
decide which ones of the remaining products they will buy based on how they
feel about it.

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narwally
If you enjoy cooking shows, definitely take a look at Mind of a Chef. David
Chang is the star of the show's first season, and it's narrated by Anthony
Bourdain. Probably the most cerebral cooking show I've ever seen.

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wehadfun
Pizza businesses have basically operated like this for years.

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arasmussen
How is this different than Sprig, Munchery, UberFRESH, Zesty, Deliverance,
etc?

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cahoodle
Seems like the difference is in the quality. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they
are a bit pricier than the above, and seems to serve fancier food? I'm
wondering if there is a market for slightly better quality/higher priced
delivery food...

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mkagenius
The high price might be tricking you into thinking the product is better than
others.

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physcab
This idea became much more palatable to me when I went to a restaurant after
work to grab some take-out for dinner. I walked inside and saw no one sitting
down but the kitchen staff were furiously working and cooking. I thought it
was so strange and wondered who they were cooking for. And then all of a
sudden I saw: 1 postmates courier, 1 doordash courier and 1 caviar worker all
walk in with giant bags. I realized how this new trend is going to change
restaurants and make them more 'lean'. No need to spend crazy amount of money
for location, no need for a huge seating area, no need for expensive storage
machines. Just a kitchen and distribution.

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acconrad
Are people interested in a lower-cost option? I find myself making the same
meals (simple salads, chicken & rice), and these do not cost a lot per meal,
certainly not $12. It would be nice to order $3-5 meals of things I would
normally cook but just don't have time for, which would be appealing to the
parents of the world. That is something I would set up a meal plan for so I
never had to buy groceries or cook, but still receive high-quality (albeit
basic) food.

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beat
Restaurants aren't high-profit businesses by and large. As Peter Thiel
observed, in order to make significant profit margins, you need something
monopoly-like. In perfect competition, profit is impossible, and near-perfect
competition like restaurants drives profits very low.

Cachet restaurants offering singular experiences can get that monopoly of
uniqueness to a certain extent, but it's very difficult and requires operating
at an extremely high level of art.

So basically, if you want to compete on price, welcome to racing to the
bottom, and competing directly with the likes of Dominos and McDonalds. At
tiny margins, economies of scale become extremely important.

In the case of this story, by bringing a world-class chef like David Chang in
(see the first season of _Mind of a Chef_ to grok his greatness), they're
going for an upscale market - people who really care about eating. Those
people will always be outnumbered 100:1 by people eating wretched disgusting
crap at Subway. That's where the quasi-monopoly comes in - not just delivering
food, but delivering the kind of food a mind like David Chang can create, at
lunchtime prices and convenience.

So Maple isn't competing with Domino's. They're competing with fine-dining
lunches.

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acconrad
Right but Dominos and McDonalds are all terrible food that isn't healthy. And
only Dominos delivers.

If my neighbor can cook my rice and beans for $0.30 USD / serving, or $3 for a
basic salad (spinach, serving nuts, beans, olive oil, vinegar), I'd pay $1-5
to have that delivered to me. How does that not keep up with profits?

I mean what's shocking to me is that families across the country make these
basic meals that seem clearly too basic for restaurants to make. But most
families (especially poorer ones) just don't have time to make the food, but
they want something cheap, so they resort to fast food - when I'm sure they'd
be fine with spending the same (or less) on a rice and beans dish instead of a
big mac.

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sfeng
An AirBnB for food seems like an interesting idea. Making it hyper-local (i.e.
in the same building in NYC) would eliminate the delivery need, and you could
market hard to one building at a time to get enough people on board. It seems
the problem would be the health code requirements.

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CPLX
This exists and is called seamless and predates Airbnb by many years.

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TillE
I've thought about starting the same kind of business (delivery-only
restaurant), but Manhattan is a ridiculously crowded market for moderately
priced, high quality food.

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pakled_engineer
Fitness angle, prepared meals that help you maintain or lose weight. Tabloid
huckster Perez Hilton dropped all his weight from using those Los Angeles low
carb gourmet meal delivery services.

Here in my city restaurants seem to be all about specialty cured and smoked
in-house meat there's an explosion of hipster hand-made Ramen noodle houses
with said specialty meats that have lineups down the block everyday for lunch.

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jcarpio
How do you get good restaurant margins without alcohol sales? I wonder if the
savings of not running an actual restaurant offsets that (or more).

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vonmoltke
By not needing serving and dining room equipment or expensive locations. An
operation like this can be set up virtually anywhere a city will grant a
permit for, as long as there is a reasonable density of people around. Plus,
there are plenty of successful traditional restaurants that don't sell
alcohol, though that may vary on a regional basis.

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lsaferite
Not to mention location costs are MUCH better when you don't need popular
frontage.

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breakingcups
In Holland we've had takeaway.com (thuisbezorgd.nl actually) for a long time.
A lot of takeout places, but also some regular restaurants are on there. You
can order with an app which takes just a few seconds. Does nothing like this
exist in the US yet?

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rwmj
Sounds like Deliverance[1], which has been around in London since around 2002
or so.

[1] [https://www.deliverance.co.uk/](https://www.deliverance.co.uk/)

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dabeeeenster
The quality of the Deliverance food is, politely, really not great. I think
these guys are approaching it from a different angle; Deliverance always
struck me as a restaurant that delivers, and without the restaurant...

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potatoyogurt
I'm not sure if I get how this is any different from Munchery or Zesty. But
hey, I'm not going to complain about another company I can harvest free meals
from through referrals.

