Within the past decade we've seen a few Chinese food delivery services offering to deliver Chinese food far beyond the location of the particular restaurant involved. At first this sounds like a strange proposition. Why would there be a critical mass of customers to make it economically viable to deliver food more than two to five miles away from where the food is cooked? The answer is that we're talking Chinese food, and the fact that good authentic Chinese food tends to be concentrated in certain geographic areas, rather than being randomly spaced throughout a metropolitan area.
As it is, Chinese food and home delivery in the United States are synonymous. Indeed historians agree that restaurant delivery was invented in 1922 by Kin-Chu Cafe, located on Brand Blvd. in Glendale, CA. While though restaurant delivery did not become commonplace in America for decades, it was originated and mostly widely used by Chinese restaurants.
So it's no surprise that the Chinese are pioneering again. Long distance Chinese delivery appears to have surfaced around 2014, and can be tied in part to the surge in enrollment in Mainland Chinese students at American universities and colleges. Unlike prior generations of Chinese foreign students from Hong Kong and Taiwan, many of whom came to the United States with the intent of staying here after graduation, most of these Mainland Chinese students come with the expectation, if not the requirement, of returning to China after completing school. In such case these students have a lesser desire to adopt American cultural norms, and hence are more partial to eating the same food they ate back home. One of the most popular schools in the country for Mainland Chinese students is the University of Southern California. While USC is close to Los Angeles Chinatown, most of the Mainland students are from the non-Cantonese parts of China, and Los Angeles Chinatown serves mostly Cantonese food and where only one small Mainland (i.e., non-Cantonese) regional style restaurant can be found. Enter businesses like To Go 626 and their website togo626.com, which offered the food from the best San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurants on a sliding delivery fee schedule which worked out to $1 to $1.50 per mile.
To Go 626 made an immediate splash, even receiving a write-up in the Los Angeles Times. It became popular with the Mainland Chinese students at USC who could have their food delivered for around $15 an order, particularly nominal if a number of students pooled their order. Surprisingly it also became popular with students from UC Irvine, which given its distance more than 40 miles from the San Gabriel Valley, resulted with a delivery tab around $50. Who would pay that much to have Chinese food delivered? Well given that so many Mainland Chinese students drive a Lamborghini, Maserati, Ferrari, or other super-luxury car (or two), what's $50 for restaurant delivery? However, To Go 626 was a short lived phenomenon. Food trucks offering Mainland style Chinese cuisine started popping up on the USC campus and USC Mainland students from Northeastern China started gravitating to Koreatown restaurants serving cuisine similar to what they were familiar with. Meanwhile, Irvine saw an explosion in Chinese restaurants serving Mainland style cuisine, so there was no longer a need to import food from the San Gabriel Valley.
A much greater success story has been that of Yunbanbao in New York. Established around the same time as To Go 626, its primary impetus was not Mainland college students, but rather a sizable corps of Mainland Chinese workers on Wall Street, and originally only involved lunch. Once again, there was Chinatown nearby, but it lacked the regional Mainland style restaurants familiar to these workers. Rather, all these restaurants were located in Flushing Chinatown in Queens. Yunbunbao was founded as multiple 500 member WeChat organized pods which were connected to Flushing Chinese restaurants that provided rotating menus for bulk orders. Lunch was ordered a day in advance, prepared in the morning, and delivered to Wall Street in time for lunch. The sight of crowds of Chinese office workers lined up in the street and grabbing lunch bags from unmarked vans and SUVs garnered such puzzlement and attention that the Wall Street Journal ran an article on Yunbanbao to explain to the rest of the world what was going on. With such success, they expanded their deliveries to other concentrations of Mainland eaters in Manhattan, such as hospitals and universities, as well as back office financial workers in Jersey City. And with the pandemic they further extended their geographic reach and have begun to deliver groceries, too.
The latest long distance Chinese food delivery platform arises from a completely different direction. In Los Angeles, Mama's Drive By Kitchen is borne of two of the most current societal concerns, the pandemic and multiculturalism. Mama's mission is to preserve immigrant cultures by sharing their cuisine to a wider audience. Under the drive by kitchen model, food is ordered from participating San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurants, as well as other ethnic restaurants, with designated pickup locations in West Los Angeles, Koreatown and the San Gabriel Valley. The West LA pickup site is the most noteworthy. While the Chinese restaurant scene has greatly improved in West LA in the past five years, the choices are still limited, and the drive by kitchen gives local residents an alternative to making a 25 mile drive in Los Angeles traffic. For each order received, Mama's will buy a second order to be donated to needy community members, helping both restaurants and the community in these times of stress. At this point, the program only operates on special days but hopefully the service will expand.
While we might not see $50 restaurant deliveries again, it would not be surprising to see long distance restaurant delivery grow in the future. And like restaurant delivery itself, Chinese food started it all.
