Our appetite for takeaway food is booming. But alongside kebabs and pizzas, many diners are looking for something classier – and different. And plenty of companies are queuing up to dish it out. Emine Saner reports and, below, our food critic tries out one of the high-end delivery options, Supper
In 2001 when banker Will Shu was working on Wall Street, one of the “perks” of doing a 100-hour week was the point in the evening when someone brought out the book of menus from some of New York’s nicest restaurants and ordered dinner for everyone. They would stop work, gather in a meeting room and eat and chat. When he was posted to London in 2004, he was disappointed to find British bankers didn’t do that sort of thing. Of course you could order a takeaway pizza or a bog-standard Chinese meal, but not the kind of quality cooking he was used to.
Shu finally launched Deliveroo in 2013, to link up customers with restaurants that didn’t traditionally offer takeaway food. It took a while to convince restaurants, worried they would be listed alongside greasy takeaways, to sign up but now the company, which operates in 19 cities in the UK, has more than 2,000 restaurants including Wagamama, Gourmet Burger Kitchen and its first Michelin-starred place, Trishna. In the first half of this year, daily orders grew by 500%.
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