Julio Diaz was hungry. The problem was that Mr. Diaz was sitting in his Mitsubishi S.U.V., had a great parking spot on the Upper West Side, and could not walk away from the car until the alternate-side parking period had passed.
Anywhere else, breakfast might have had to wait. But, in a land where a bouquet of daffodils, a clubbing outfit or a box of Pampers can be summoned in the flicker of a smartphone screen, the solution was simple. Thus began Mr. Diaz’s habit of having his morning sustenance delivered directly to his car. “I have the whole works,” said Mr. Diaz, a shoe salesman. “Bacon, eggs, home fries, toast. I have a real breakfast in my car. It smells like a restaurant.”
Perhaps nothing is dearer to New Yorkers than the idea that in this city, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it this year, “I order food, it’s at my door in 10 to 15 minutes. O.K.?” (Justice Sotomayor, who grew up in the Bronx, had unkind words for Washington restaurants, where “there isn’t a place I call where it doesn’t take 45 minutes.”)
Now that the hungry can use cellphones and food-delivery apps to order anything their stomachs desire to the very spot where they stand, however, delivery is no longer confined to the apartment or the office — or even, for that matter, to a place with an address. “We go to the park all the time; we go to the beaches all the time,” said Robert Asmail, the manager at Due Fratelli Pizza in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “The police officers, they call on the corner, say, ‘We are outside patrolling.’ We go over there, we go anyplace! Doesn’t matter!” Mr. Asmail added that his deliverymen often make trips to the Red Hook piers to feed fishermen. “I don’t care,” he said. “They buy, we send it out.”
Some requests are simple enough: bring a few pizzas to the neighborhood playground or a sandwich to the local gym, ready for its sweaty devourer. Others can tax a delivery person’s ingenuity, as when the call comes from within a crowd: the middle of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park on a sunny day, for instance, or any of the city’s myriad lines.
Just ask any park-bound delivery person, who must rely on everything short of divining rods to find customers amid seas of picnickers. The lucky ones are told to look for colorful blankets or particularly loud T-shirts. Others must simply wander, and hope.
“ ‘Yeah, we’re in between tree one and two.’ We don’t get a very precise location,” Danny Nasser, who works at Maya Taqueria in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, said, recalling the predicament of one deliveryman who spent nearly an hour searching Prospect Park.
Do not get Mr. Nasser started on the time Maya’s was asked to deliver to someone working in a manhole.
Though New Yorkers seem to feel nothing is worth having unless they have to wait for it — to judge by the lines for cronuts , free Shakespeare and new iPhones — nobody likes to wait hungry. Veterans of the Shakespeare in the Park line, which usually forms before 6 a.m., know to order bacon and eggs from Andy’s Deli on the Upper West Side.
At least a few requests involve a touch of complicity. “We deliver everywhere, put it that way,” Danny Marino, who works at Johnny’s Pizzeria in Sunset Park, said, musing on the many calls the Brooklyn pizzeria has received from people in gentlemen’s clubs. “Well, they’re not actually gentlemen in there, but absolutely.”
John Hackett recalled biking uptown from the Financial District four summers ago when he witnessed a police boat heading straight to the East River shore.
“I thought they were going to be jumping off like a SWAT team or something,” Mr. Hackett said.
But there was a man on the bicycle waiting. “The next moment, the boat kind of kissed the shore. There’s a policeman there reaching over the railing of the esplanade and getting this bag of evidently Chinese food, and handing money back to the delivery guy,” Mr. Hackett said.
And then? “Everybody went their own way,” he said.
Not that ingenuity in the service of hunger has been limited to the smartphone era. As a high school senior in Brooklyn in the 1990s, Joseph Sapienza, 33, devised a scheme with friends to sidestep what he said was an unsavory cafeteria lunch by ordering Chinese food to a certain side of the school building. A classmate would prop open the window in the boys’ bathroom on the first floor to hail the deliveryman.
The lunches ended after administrators staged a sting operation. “We opened the restroom door and instead of finding our friendly delivery person, we were greeted by the dean of discipline, who happened to pay for our food and was enjoying our barbecue spare ribs right there in the restroom,” Mr. Sapienza said.
But perhaps the most brazen delivery location of all is straight to the table of another restaurant.
When Market Table , the West Village restaurant that Jules Auger’s friends had picked for dinner one night, ran out of the cheeseburger special, Mr. Auger, unwilling to commit to the prix fixe menu his friends had chosen — and apparently unmoved by the restaurant’s two-star review in this newspaper, its five-star raves on Yelp or its recommendation in the Michelin guide — pulled upSeamless on his smartphone.
A cheesesteak place promised speedy delivery. Mr. Auger instructed the deliveryman to come to the restaurant and seek out the hostess, who — while not exactly amused — condoned Mr. Auger’s alternate dinner.
“I think she thought it was a joke,” said Mr. Auger, an intern at an advertising agency. “Didn’t get kicked out, though.”
More befuddled was the deliveryman who showed up outside, seemingly expecting an apartment building. Mr. Auger hurried outside to receive his cheesesteak (“quite mediocre,” he recalled), which he ate outside, he said, “out of respect.”
Source: NY Times (http://goo.gl/SuSRn9)
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