If You Don’t Have a Culinista™, There’s Seamless Web

I wanted a tuna sandwich at 2am last week. I’d been working nonstop through the day and hadn’t had a chance to break for dinner. So, by the middle of the night, still gazing into my computer screen, I got hungry.

“Eating has never been so easy,” claims Seamless Web, an online food delivery service that caters to New York, DC, Philadelphia, and Connecticut. My tech savvy older brother has been using Seamless Web for years and continuously referenced the site to me, but I never found a reason to use it, or even to visit it. Whenever I want to order food, I do what most New Yorkers do. I pull out the messy, spilled-on menu file, made up of menus dated back decades, and call up one of my three stand-bys.

This time—maybe because it was 2am or maybe because I was still in computer-mode—I remembered Seamless Web. It was a revolutionary discovery. Many well-known restaurants are on the site, from Turks & Frogs to EJ’s to Haru to Burritoville.

This website is a completely searchable catalogue of menus. After prompting the hungry surfer for a delivery address, the web engine pulls up restaurants that will deliver—it is live and time sensitive so you can only search restaurants that will absolutely deliver the goods—no calling to get unanswered rings for twenty minutes.
After you’ve selected your restaurant, a menu pops up. Each dish is clickable—allowing you to learn more about the dish and to give special instructions (i.e. sauce on the side, extra wasabi, etc.) to the restaurant. You can add a tip to your card so that when food arrives, you can get straight to devouring it—which is exactly what I did when my tuna sandwich arrived—well within the allotted forty-minute delivery period.

In fact, the deliveryman was buzzing before I could even figure out how the magical process had occurred. Apparently, after the order is made, it prints at the restaurant. The restaurant confirms the order, and a confirmation email is generated to the client. Thereafter, the process goes down like normal delivery—sans the rummaging through menus or stressed restaurant staff—just a tuna sandwich at 2am.