My parents are friends with a couple of disagreeable people, the kind who have aggressively worded bumper stickers on their car and somehow have the ability to turn innocuous phrases like ‘How are you?’ into something that feels like a challenge. They have an extremely on-brand sign in their kitchen, which says “Today’s Menu Choices: Take It or Leave It.”
But in their defense, that’s typically the way most menus work: Either you eat what the restaurant has on offer (with a limited amount of personalization), or you go someplace else. But a Russian food delivery company is changing that, and has launched a service that will allow its customers to order pretty much any-damn-thing from a restaurant, whether or not that restaurant actually serves those things.
According to Bloomberg, when a customer places an order, Yandex NV will take a meal kit with all of the necessary ingredients to a local restaurant, where it will be cooked before being delivered by a Yandex driver. This newly launched system is an unholy mashup of Yandex.Eats, which is a standard food delivery service, and Yandex.Chef, which serves up (uncooked) meal kits to its customers.
“Restaurants can expand their menu without additional expenses on food, marketing and delivery," a Yandex spokesperson said in a statement. At least for now, customers can choose from a list of “hundreds of the most popular dishes” from Yandex’s other services, and those items will be cooked to order, “even if nearby restaurants aren’t specialized in it.”
On the one hand, this is definitely a way for Yandex to differentiate itself from other food delivery services. On the other, it also seems like a recipe—no stupid puns intended—for moderately unsatisfied customers, frustrated restaurant owners, and some not-great entrees.
Yandex.Eats launched in Russia in February 2018, after Yandex acquired an online food delivery service called Foodfox and Uber, which included the local version of Uber Eats. Last fall, the company tested a pop-up system called “dark kitchens,” a temporary location where three or more Yandex-supported restaurants could prepare delivery orders; Yandex NV seems to be kind of a larger scale, on-site version of a “dark kitchen,” and no, I don’t want to stop using the phrase “dark kitchen.”
Yandex NV will launch in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. In other cities, the menu options remain “Take It or Leave It.”
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