We are all Slave now.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

They don't deliver.

The burbs will never catch up. Your pizza and Chinese food sucks. Those are staples. And the fact that restaurants have to pay more people to cover more square mileage of fewer people means it will never work well in the 'burbs.

TM

I have thought about this quite a bit. There is good food in some suburbs, particularly where rents are low and chefs can do good stuff. I don't know the NY suburbs and I do know DC, but I think the economics are probably the same. (SF and SV are weird because SV rents are so expensive.) When food is bad, it's often because the restaurant has high rent and needs to play it safe or because it doesn't serve that many people and needs to play it safe to appeal to more of the people it does serve. Delivery helps with both problems, so it should help suburban restaurants. Suburban Chinese and pizza does often suck, but if you've got more choice then it should get better. Delivery helps urban restaurants too, but not quite as much relatively. The economics of delivery work better where you can get around well by car. All else equal, the city is always going to be better off because the kind of people who want to create good food are more likely to want to be in the city.