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I never thought about this before, but apparently if you order online from a giant delivery service you can unwittingly be ordering from some guy cooking frozen food in his Mom's kitchen with zero health inspection. And apparently the giant delivery services don't want to get involved in the origin of the meals they deliver. I guess if you live in a city you know what restaurants you like, but if you're new or visiting you may be rolling the dice.
On the rare occasion we have ordered from a service, it's been places that we know are restaurants. If I was ordering from a place I didn't know, I'd Google the place and check reviews, etc.
Rules regarding food prep differ from state to state and country to country. A few years back, I was thinking about vending at a farmer's market and looked into it. In Florida, it was called cottage food industry and you could only sell things like breads, cookies, cakes, shelf stable preserves, canned food, etc, i.e. nothing that required being kept hot or cold for storage. If you wanted to sell something that required being hot or cold, then you had to go through the full process.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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We don't use those services at all. Either we pick up at one of our favorite restaurants, or order from good restaurants that use their own delivery people (pizza and Chinese). Also, we will go to one of the food trucks by
a favorite restaurant that added one or went all food truck due to the pandemic.
I never thought about this before, but apparently if you order online from a giant delivery service you can unwittingly be ordering from some guy cooking frozen food in his Mom's kitchen with zero health inspection. And apparently the giant delivery services don't want to get involved in the origin of the meals they deliver. I guess if you live in a city you know what restaurants you like, but if you're new or visiting you may be rolling the dice.
I know that in some markets, Chucky Cheese's was selling pizza under the name of DiAngelo's ay some point early on in the pandemic.
Do realize that there are a lot of ghost kitchens out there. Closed restaurants have leased out their kitchens to other restaurants to prepare a lot of the delivery food so that it does not impact their main kitchen.
The major food delivery services (in the US at least) aren't going to do business with some guy reheating frozen food in his mom's kitchen. Too much room for liability. They're going to have established restaurants with appropriate business licenses.
I know that in some markets, Chucky Cheese's was selling pizza under the name of DiAngelo's ay some point early on in the pandemic.
Do realize that there are a lot of ghost kitchens out there. Closed restaurants have leased out their kitchens to other restaurants to prepare a lot of the delivery food so that it does not impact their main kitchen.
Yes, but many ghost kitchens will be associated with an existing restaurant. For example, we have a delivery burrito company that popped up that is associated with a Mexican restaurant. Another Chicago chain has also opened up a lot of ghost kitchens to serve the suburbs and many other cities.
Since I'm not living in France, I'm not even worried enough about this to go thru the minimal effort of Google translating and reading the article.
Journal de Montreal is a francophone newspaper in Canada.
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Would I trust a restaurant because it is recommended through a site like Ubereats?
Nope.
One of the food delivery websites in Tucson created a website for a local restaurant without the consent of the particular restaurant. When the promised food was not delivered, the restaurant owners received all of the complaints. They made a lot of efforts to get the site shut down.
The major food delivery services (in the US at least) aren't going to do business with some guy reheating frozen food in his mom's kitchen. Too much room for liability. They're going to have established restaurants with appropriate business licenses.
True, but what I have heard that's been an issue with some of the delivery services is that the restaurant hasn't contracted with these companies, but the delivery companies say that they do--they end up placing take-out orders as regular customers unbeknowst to the restaurant. But if something happens with the order, the customer blames the restaurant, who didn't know that GrubHub was even involved. Or scammers order food with stolen credit cards, so restaurants don't get their money.
How many people check the health inspection reports for the restaurants they frequent? You can look it up online generally but how many people go to the trouble? Trust me, you won't always like what you find. It takes a lot to get a restaurant closed down.
Also worth noting, in some locations inspections have been carried out 'virtually' since the start of the pandemic and you can imagine that may have reduced their thoroughness considerably.
My point is that even going to your favorite neighborhood restaurant you can't be sure that all standards and practices are up to scratch. So you can cook yourself really..but then of course those ingredients..who knows about those?
Unless you're planting, harvesting, storing and cooking all of your own food, you're always depending on other people following rules and doing their jobs properly.
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