Roll on the day when restaurants re-open

by award-winning journalist and author Joanna Blythman

We’ve been cooking since March 2019: two meals a day, most days. Pre-Covid, I never considered using those restaurant home delivery companies that bike food to your door, but I was craving something different, something beyond our competency, an Asian noodle dish from a certain restaurant that doesn’t do its own delivery. Pick-up would have been tricky. Double yellow lines, impossible to stop even for five minutes. On foot, the food would be cold by the time we got home. So I decided to lift my lifelong ban on these restaurant courier companies. After all, everyone else uses them, or so it seems. What could possibly go wrong?

We got into the spirit of it. Chopsticks out, bowls warming, candles lit, wine chilling. I wasn’t too disconcerted when the appointed time- 6.30pm- came and went, yet the doorbell didn’t ring, but I stood at my lit front door to make it easier for the courier to find us. At 6.39pm, still no food, but I received a breezy text telling me that my order had been delivered.

I started with the restaurant. The person in charge had very limited English. He told me to contact the company. Then began the long, exasperating process of communicating with this business that had made billions internationally. Seek help from a live chat “helper-bot”. Phone the company, only to speak to a person in a distant call centre who would forward my demand for a refund to the “investigations team”. Only a 72 hours wait for a response from them, I was told.  Grumpy? I was hangry. Toast with cheese and leftover crumble isn’t my idea of an exotic Saturday night dinner.

Five days later, swearing under my breath, I am resuming attempts at recovering the £42 this virtual company took from me in exchange for nothing. Another faraway soul who has the misfortune of working for this outfit now tells me that a refund is coming my way. Just watch your account, she says. No email to that effect has arrived. If the money actually appears, I expect the cash will have been deducted highhandedly, either from the restaurant, already paying up to 25% commission to this greedy company, or from the driver, who may, or may not have been at fault.

I swear that I will never use one of these soulless, parasitic delivery companies again. They predate the restaurant sector and grow ever fatter and more parasitic with lockdown. They make us into passive, socially isolated consumers when we yearn to be convivial, engaged diners in a real bricks and mortar restaurant.

Couldn’t every restaurant do its own home delivery, like Fred, at l’escargot bleu? Lots can’t adapt to delivery, and for good reason. Those that do see it as a short-term survival measure, not a blueprint for the future.

This New Abnormal has gone on for too long. There is zilch evidence that restaurants are vectors for virus transmission. The statistics show that when open, with protocols in place, they were one of the safest places to be. Roll on the day when restaurants re-open. They should, and soon.