9 ms·

David Chang's New Startup: A Restaurant Without the Restaurant

44 points by JrobertsHstaff 11y ago

TillE 11y ago
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.
- pakled_engineer 11y ago
  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.
potatoyogurt 11y ago
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.
rwmj 11y ago
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/
- dabeeeenster 11y ago
  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...
- anu_gupta 11y ago
  Deliverance has a fixed and fairly extensive menu, which has minor seasonal updates, compared to this, where the menu is very limited and changes daily.
arasmussen 11y ago
How is this different than Sprig, Munchery, UberFRESH, Zesty, Deliverance, etc?
- cahoodle 11y ago
  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...
  - mkagenius 11y ago
    The high price might be tricking you into thinking the product is better than others.
- vivekpreddy 11y ago
  This seems like a complete copy of Sprig to be honest. The food is only part of the battle though- will they be able to tackle the actual backend logistics? We'll have to wait and see...
- kelukelugames 11y ago
  I think throwing around "David Chang" is going to make a huge difference. He is currently one of the most popular American chefs. It's almost like Apple having Ives. Of course, we are ignoring all of Apple's other advantages too.
- smackfu 11y ago
  It's in NYC rather than the Bay Area?
michael_h 11y ago
> 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.
- beat 11y ago
  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.
  - mod 11y ago
    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.
    - beat 11y ago
      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!
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Thread about the ticketing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786
jcarpio 11y ago
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).
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  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.
  - lsaferite 11y ago
    Not to mention location costs are MUCH better when you don't need popular frontage.
physcab 11y ago
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.
wehadfun 11y ago
Pizza businesses have basically operated like this for years.
acconrad 11y ago
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.
- sfeng 11y ago
  I think you're right that it's possible, but I just want to point out that most restaurant-type operations operate at about 30% food cost. So if you want to charge $3, your food needs to cost $1. Delivery, which is included in the OP, is also an economy of scale. It doesn't make sense to do a delivery run just to make a $1 profit.
  - acconrad 11y ago
    Right but most restaurant-type operations do 30% food cost because the other costs are employees and real estate. Couldn't costs be driven down via crowdsourcing and no real estate?
    - sfeng 11y ago
      Quality control would become pretty challenging. Ignoring that though, it all adds up to $/hr. You need to build a setup which allows the participating chefs to make $20-30/hr consistently. Delivery would be a real time sink.
- beat 11y ago
  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.
GauntletWizard 11y ago
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.
- beat 11y ago
  How is BMW's business model different from Hyundai's? Upscale experience matters.
  - spiritplumber 11y ago
    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?
    - ryanx435 11y ago
      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.
rjett 11y ago
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.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > 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.
narwally 11y ago
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.
dbot 11y ago
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.
- smackfu 11y ago
  It just launched yesterday, so I assume the reviews will come soon enough.
- jcromartie 11y ago
  A few Chinese places will do the work to make their food travel well. It's all about ventilation to keep crispy things crispy. I've seen some pretty elaborate setups with foil, cardboard, and paper bags that did the trick. I'd imagine desiccants might help too.
- mathattack 11y ago
  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_delivery-.html http://www.grubstreet.com/2011/05/introducing_savory_a_deliv...
breakingcups 11y ago
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?

TillE 11y ago

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.

pakled_engineer 11y ago
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.

potatoyogurt 11y ago

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.

rwmj 11y ago

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/

dabeeeenster 11y ago
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...
anu_gupta 11y ago
Deliverance has a fixed and fairly extensive menu, which has minor seasonal updates, compared to this, where the menu is very limited and changes daily.

arasmussen 11y ago

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

cahoodle 11y ago
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...
- mkagenius 11y ago
  The high price might be tricking you into thinking the product is better than others.
vivekpreddy 11y ago
This seems like a complete copy of Sprig to be honest. The food is only part of the battle though- will they be able to tackle the actual backend logistics? We'll have to wait and see...
kelukelugames 11y ago
I think throwing around "David Chang" is going to make a huge difference. He is currently one of the most popular American chefs. It's almost like Apple having Ives. Of course, we are ignoring all of Apple's other advantages too.
smackfu 11y ago
It's in NYC rather than the Bay Area?

michael_h 11y ago

> 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.

beat 11y ago
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.
- mod 11y ago
  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.
  - beat 11y ago
    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!
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Thread about the ticketing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786

jcarpio 11y ago

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).

vonmoltke 11y ago
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.
- lsaferite 11y ago
  Not to mention location costs are MUCH better when you don't need popular frontage.

physcab 11y ago

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.

wehadfun 11y ago

Pizza businesses have basically operated like this for years.

acconrad 11y ago

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.

sfeng 11y ago
I think you're right that it's possible, but I just want to point out that most restaurant-type operations operate at about 30% food cost. So if you want to charge $3, your food needs to cost $1. Delivery, which is included in the OP, is also an economy of scale. It doesn't make sense to do a delivery run just to make a $1 profit.
- acconrad 11y ago
  Right but most restaurant-type operations do 30% food cost because the other costs are employees and real estate. Couldn't costs be driven down via crowdsourcing and no real estate?
  - sfeng 11y ago
    Quality control would become pretty challenging. Ignoring that though, it all adds up to $/hr. You need to build a setup which allows the participating chefs to make $20-30/hr consistently. Delivery would be a real time sink.
beat 11y ago
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.

GauntletWizard 11y ago

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.

beat 11y ago
How is BMW's business model different from Hyundai's? Upscale experience matters.
- spiritplumber 11y ago
  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?
  - ryanx435 11y ago
    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.

rjett 11y ago

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.

vonmoltke 11y ago
> 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.

narwally 11y ago

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.

dbot 11y ago

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.

smackfu 11y ago
It just launched yesterday, so I assume the reviews will come soon enough.
jcromartie 11y ago
A few Chinese places will do the work to make their food travel well. It's all about ventilation to keep crispy things crispy. I've seen some pretty elaborate setups with foil, cardboard, and paper bags that did the trick. I'd imagine desiccants might help too.
mathattack 11y ago
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_delivery-.html http://www.grubstreet.com/2011/05/introducing_savory_a_deliv...

breakingcups 11y ago

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?